


Under the Stars of Orion

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: I'm Peter, I'm 19 and I Never Learned to Read [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, College Student Peter Parker, Coming Out, Domestic Fluff, Eating Disorders, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Happy Ending, Harley Keener & Peter Parker Friendship, Homesickness, Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Panic Attacks, Recreational Drug Use, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22207309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: Peter reaches up to poke him in the goatee. "If this story ends with any mention of beds or kissing, that's it. I'm moving out tomorrow.""My baby," Tony croons, feigning teary eyes. "My infant genius. All ready to take over MIT with the power of nerddom and grouchiness.""Oh, hey," Peter grins cheekily in the dark. "Please, don't stop the waterworks on my account.""I'm not crying, you're crying.""No, you are.""No,youare.""My eyes have never been drier,old man.""Sweet mother of all things holy, are you two, like, five?" Harley grumbles from the floor.Tony delivers him a soft, swift kick to the shoulder. In the dark, a sole middle finger rises into their field of vision and then descends back into the mass of blankets. A beat later, Peter and Tony are hissing in barely contained laughter.--It's Peter's 18th birthday celebration, and he spends it together with Ned, MJ, Harley, May and Tony in quietness and reflection before heading off to college--where time and distance will prove the strength of their love for one another.
Relationships: Harley Keener & Peter Parker, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Michelle Jones & Harley Keener & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Ned Leeds/Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: I'm Peter, I'm 19 and I Never Learned to Read [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1394110
Comments: 67
Kudos: 207





	1. Act I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally cranking out more content for college!Peter, lads! I've decided that the tone of this series is going to be introspective and seriously domestic. With lots of fluff, a dash of angst, a cup of comfort and, oh, did I mention? LOTS OF FLUFF.
> 
> No trigger warnings for this chapter; they will be posted for the next one.
> 
> Theme song and title inspiration: "Run" by Delta Rae
> 
> Thanks for clicking and please enjoy!!

“Smell that, minions?”

MJ rolls her eyes at the back of Peter, who is draped at a near-180-degree angle across the windowsill with his lower half still dangling in the kitchen. “What?” she deadpans. “Cat piss and yesterday’s Popeye’s?”

Ned, who has been clattering noisily at the sink in his questionable foray into washing dishes, clatters a little less noisily to offer his opinion. “It’s the eau de Queens. Totally unique and unparalleled.”

“ _No_ ,” Peter stresses, “it’s the smell of eighteen. Young and sweet, dancing queen--”

“You’re misquoting, but I’ll allow it because you’re cute and you’ll probably fall to your death if I don’t humor you, babe,” says Ned. Quite self-contradictorily, he shoots MJ a conspiratorial look, touches a finger to his lips, and then raises his other hand to flick a blob of soap suds at the back of Peter’s neck.

The answering shriek is so worth the monumental effort MJ puts into maintaining a poker face.

She cocks a brow over her glass of apple juice as Peter clambers back in, bashing his head against the top of the open window frame in the process. “Thought you had a tingle for that,” she says mildly.

“My _Spidey_ -sense activates for criminals, murderers, Flash, and May’s cooking. Although I’m starting to think I gotta recalibrate it for traitors.” Peter glares at them both, practically vibrating like a shiba inu that is barely containing its rage. MJ snorts and slings an arm around his shoulder and Ned does some sort of torso twist of gymnastic proportions to plop a wet kiss on Peter’s cheek with a smack.

“What about fashionable has-beens with titanium prosthetics?” Tony quips. He whips off his shades and pockets them with a practiced suavity as he steps into the already overcrowded kitchenette.

Peter wriggles out from underneath the grabby hands of his boyfriend and best friend and stumbles over to Tony. “They tried to shove soap down my back. Arrest them, Iron Man.”

“Oh, hm, lemme see.” Tony checks his watch. “Afraid I can’t, squirt. You’re a fully legal baby vigilante now. Feel free to grab your Danskins and arrest them yourself.”

Peter opens and closes his mouth with a click, then drops his head to pinch the bridge of his nose. If anyone is struck by the uncanny resemblance to Tony’s usual posture around his Spider-Adoptee, they definitely do not mention it.

“I don’t know how many times you gotta make the same kind of joke before you realize you’re just roasting your own Spider-Suit concept when you call it that,” Peter mutters.

“That’s because unlike you, I have the poise and panache to be able to roast myself,” Tony points out. He ruffles Peter’s hair as he passes. “Oh, hey, wouldja look at that, I had to reach a quarter of an inch higher to do that.”

“Says the Avenger who wears platforms in all his photo-ops!” Peter retorts. He bounces on the tile floor and jumps onto Tony’s back, instantly koala-ing his arms and legs around the man’s torso. The man grumbles loudly but belies his own good nature by automatically interlocking his elbows with the kid’s knees.

MJ has nudged Ned aside with an elbow to take over the dishwashing and delegate him to drying the snack bowls with a towel, because she apparently could not take another second of his unnecessary splashing. “Y’know,” she muses over her shoulder, “it’s probably all the flying and flipping and theatrics. Drains all the protein out of the body.”

Tony spins on the spot to confront MJ with a look of faux offense, his jaw hanging open and his back still bent over from Peter’s weight. A phone has miraculously materialized in Ned’s hands and he is making a very unsuspicious face with his tongue poking out between his teeth.

The apartment door flings open with a bang then, which prompts Tony to swivel in the other direction and stride to the kitchen doorway just as Peter starts to protest, “Hey, hey, wait, _wait, Mr. Stark my head watch out my_ \--”

And that’s how Harley finds them when he capers inside, laden by grocery bags: MJ elbow-deep in soap suds with the ever-judgmental curve to her eyebrow, Peter bashing his forehead on the kitchen lintel with a yelp, Tony keeling over onto the tile with the double-chinned look of a blindsided chimpanzee, and Ned fulfilling his childhood journalistic dreams by filming the entire thing with a thumbs-up and a grimace.

Harley stares. And then stares some more and drawls, “I leave you alone for _forty-five minutes_."

\--

It turns out that Tony can make a mean batch of pancakes when he puts his mind to it, and Harley flashes his “highly underappreciated skill set” at decorating about four dozen cinnamon Wookie cookies in fifty-seven minutes flat. (“That’s a minute and twelve seconds per Wookie face, Pete.” “Yeah, okay, sure.” “With _shading_ and _fur detail_ , you ungrateful cretin.” “Oh. Oh! Is it hallelujah time? Hold on, lemme grab May’s rosary--” “Fuck you, Parker.”)

In all fairness, Peter does attempt every four minutes to stick his well-meaning but clumsy nose into the baking. Ned preens himself afterward for shouldering the herculean task of distracting his boyfriend with fresh cookie dough and a couple of intense rounds of Seven Ate Nine. 

About an hour later, May plods inside to the aroma of vanilla and nutmeg blending with the punch of marinara sauce of whatever it is Tony is stirring on the stove. Ned and her boy Peter are engaged in some complicated version of footsie over a card game, while MJ is curled up on one end of the couch with a four-hundred-page tome open in her lap and her phone probably hidden in the spine so she can hop online and fight more anti-Iron Man tweets under her secret account. Harley is--for lack of a better word--draped diagonally across the opposite end of the couch with his head near the carpet, his bare feet about two inches away from MJ’s face and his fingers plucking away at a ukulele.

May simply stands there for a moment and shuts her eyes. She inhales the cacophony of smells and chatter and tinkering that shouldn’t make sense together and yet somehow paint the portrait of the perfect family, the _only_ family she could have ever dreamed of. Her car keys jangle in her hand as the tension seeps from her body in degrees. At the jingling sound, Tony sets down his wooden spoon with a tap and thrusts his head around the doorway of the kitchenette.

May sticks out her tongue at him. “Honey, I’m home,” she singsongs. It’s more for the benefit of the kids than for Tony, and they both know it, but his eyes still soften with a sparkle when they share a look of fond domesticity.

Peter sidles up to his aunt and peppers her cheeks with kisses. “Mr. Stark was a menace. See this huge bump on my head?”

“Not getting up,” hollers Harley from the living room. “Masterpiece in the making here. But let it be known I adore you, Mrs. Parker.”

\--

Tony wishes he could install FRIDAY 2.0 in the Parkers’ apartment just to record his favorite moments from Peter’s eighteenth birthday celebration. It is a cramped and boisterous affair spent indoors, with the windows cranked open and the kids passing an electric fan from one person to the other because the poor A/C unit won’t blow anything below seventy-five Fahrenheit, but for all Tony’s protests that it would be far more comfortable and spacious in the Tower, he knows he could never take this away from Peter. Not the familiarity of his own space, surrounded by his people, on his last birthday get-together before college officially starts.

He supposes he’ll have to make do, then. He subtly taps his temple to trigger the nanites to materialize into his glasses, and he points his gaze toward May and Peter and company and simply sits there on the carpet to take it all in and let the little camera do its job.

Later he will flip through the footage and find much of it indecipherable because he either moved his head too much or laughed too loudly and too shakily, but there are some salvageable moments.

Like when Peter and Ned wax passionate about some Bong Joon-Ho movie and how the symbolism of the needles in the film was not at all cheap, and Peter has his head cradled in Ned’s lap like it’s the safest place in the world as Ned runs his hands through his boyfriend’s curls and nods in fervent agreement.

(“And the thing is, _so many people_ miss out on amazing films because of the subtitles! Did you hear what he said when he made his award speech? It’s just a one-inch barrier, really--” 

“Yup, yeah, isn’t it preposterous how the whole world watches English movies but, like, America won’t do the opposite?”

“ _Exactly_ , oh my _God_. Oh! Oh oh oh!” Peter slaps Ned’s thigh. “Remember when you got your first flip phone and you made that four-minute thing about french fries?!”

“Peter, that was the peak of my cinematic talent.”)

Or like when Ned jumps up to help MJ stack up the syrup-smeared plates and take them to the kitchen sink, and May is smirking at Peter where the boy is sprawled across the coffee table. “Hm, I quite like that boy, darling,” she hums over the top of a magazine she is most definitely not reading. “When will you ask him out?”

“ _Mayyy_ ,” Peter whines, and slaps his hands over his face with a groan.

Or like when Harley pads across the carpeted living room to drop his chin on top of May’s head, as he is wont to do with the loved ones he likes most to annoy, and he settles the ukulele in her lap and unceremoniously orders her to play despite her protests--because she has “the look of a faerie bard trapped by time and space and just waiting to burst into song.”

So of course May heaves a sigh and plays a chord, and of course it’s the most terrifying and discordant thing they’ve ever heard in their lives that even MJ is jumpscared out of her origami-folding session.

Or--or like when they’ve all inhaled their third pizza that day, and the afternoon has slipped past to linger on the threshold of evening, and it’s Tony’s turn to have Peter’s head in his lap while the kid’s legs are draped over May’s and his feet are being massaged by MJ. Harley and Ned are inert on the floor in an extended blanket burrito, head to head, against the sudden August chill. One of the windows--the one in the kitchen, Tony thinks--must still be open because even he can hear the squeak of bicycle tires on gravel from four floors down. But even if any of them has realized where the stale breeze is blowing from, they’re all too lazy to get up and shut the window because they’re all a little sticky and tired and content and _How to Train Your Dragon 2_ is playing on the TV.

And they stay like that for minutes and minutes until the seconds turn to hours and nearly everyone’s breaths have slowed to a quiet rhythm. MJ rouses herself momentarily to stumble off to the bathroom, knuckling her eyelids with a mutter. Peter blinks awake at the movement and the discovery that his feet are cold again.

“Time’s it?” Peter whispers.

“Time for you to stop your shenanigans.”

Peter attempts a pout but is surprised by a yawn so wide that his jaw pops. “Oh, geez, wow, sorry," he mumbles, followed by another yawn intense enough to make his entire body flinch.

Tony lifts a brow at him in amusement. “Please, don’t stop the dance routine on my account.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “I hope your legs fell asleep."

“Oh, yeah, ages ago,” Tony whispers cheerily. When Peter attempts to bolt upright in guilt, the man grabs him by the shoulders and shoves him downward to keep him there in his lap. “You just got here,” Tony chides him. "Leaving so soon?"

Peter doesn't put up much of a fight at all. Instead, he crosses his arms, rubs his hands up and down them with the dry rasp of knuckles on skin, and burrows deeper into Tony's lap. "Mm, actually, gotta stock up on my cuddling hours. Move-in day is ten days away and Gen Z'ers might be pretty open about physical affection, but I'm pretty sure I'll get, like, arrested if I cuddle a stranger."

"Remind me to tell you about the time I accidentally cuddled Pepper after this scholarship gala and we weren't even--"

Peter reaches up to poke him in the goatee. "If this story ends with any mention of beds or kissing, that's it. I'm moving out tomorrow."

"My baby," Tony croons, feigning teary eyes. "My infant genius. All ready to take over MIT with the power of nerddom and grouchiness."

"Oh, hey," Peter grins cheekily in the dark. "Please, don't stop the waterworks on my account."

"I'm not crying, you're crying."

"No, you are."

"No, _you_ are."

"My eyes have never been drier, _old man_."

"Sweet mother of all things holy, are you two, like, five?" Harley grumbles from the floor.

Tony delivers him a soft, swift kick to the shoulder. In the dark, a sole middle finger rises into their field of vision and then descends back into the mass of blankets. A beat later, Peter and Tony are hissing in barely contained laughter.

As their muffled giggles taper off, Peter feels Tony's ribs shudder in a heavy sigh. He peeps one eye open in concern.

"Tony?"

The man shakes his head. But by the way his fingers have buried themselves back in Peter's hair and are tracing little figure eights across his scalp, the boy knows there is some genuine emotion overcoming Tony that he refuses to articulate.

"It's fine if you were _actually_ crying, you know. Dr. Nayan said it's healthy to show emotions."

Tony huffs. "What d'you think I've been doing all day, bud? At this point I don't know how to show anything _but_ emotions."

"That's because you're Italian," Peter points out. He pops his other eye open so they can continue the conversation properly. "But, like. For real. Were you crying?"

Tony grinds his teeth lightly for a few seconds--a bad habit he never outgrew in situations where he's biding his time till the steadiness of his voice comes back.

A shrug, a sniff. And then--"Maybe."

Peter stares directly up at him in a bid to get Tony to make eye contact. Predictably, Tony refuses to meet his eye.

"I'm just going to Massachusetts," Peter says softly, even though it's lame and stupid and they both know that's completely not the point.

And Tony responds, probably twice as lamely in their mutual pretense that this is what it's all about: "Yeah, I know. Shoulda rebranded you to leeches instead of spiders. Couldn't get rid of ya even if I tried."

"You can come visit me every other weekend," the boy goes on. "Every weekend, actually, if you, uh, if you wanna do the whole _surprise, I'm popping in to make sure you're not doing drugs_ thing like a suburban dad."

Tony chews his lip and, surprisingly, doesn't rise to the bait.

The next words that leave him are infinitely quiet, as if his heart whispered them and he is unaware.

"I've never told you I love you, Pete."

Peter rolls over carefully so his face is pressed a little closer to Tony's stomach. The man feels the puff of his breaths through the cotton tee and the brush of the boy's lashes as he blinks. "Actually," Pete murmurs, "you did."

Tony makes an inquisitive noise.

"When you were sleeping over with us 'cause Pepper was out of the country and you didn't wanna be alone," Peter explains. "You didn't ask us to come over, but you just, like, rang May at nine in the evening and said you were coming with food and she asked you how far out you were 'cause she'd just put away the leftovers and you said you were right outside the door. I remember that because I could actually hear your heartbeat coming up the elevator but I didn't say anything. I wanted to see the look on May's face. And also, you were standing outside the door for so long, I didn't know if you were about to change your mind."

Tony hums after a beat. He remembers that night, now. How he'd woken from an off-schedule nap and found himself disoriented and alone in the lab, accompanied only by the blue glow of his work and the peaceful squeaking of DUM-E a couple dozen feet away. How he'd been engulfed without warning by the tidal crash of loneliness, of that sense of being so small, and how he'd made the split-second decision to hurry down to the garage and book it to Queens instead of doing something regrettable to silence the screaming in his head.

Peter is still talking. "So you came in with the mint brownies and you pretended you got them for yourself and not for me even though the entire galaxy knows how much you hate mint. You also got May a chicken rotisserie from some god-awful expensive place or whatever, and you started talking really long and really loud and I remember--I remember May looking at you in a funny way." Pete's voice lowers, tentatively, almost reverently. "We both knew you looked like you were five seconds away from crying or something."

Tony clears his throat. "Maybe," he says again.

"Yeah. Well. After we had second dinner and I went to make tea for May and I was washing the dishes while waiting for it to steep, I heard you come into the kitchen. You were just, like, watching me. I distinctly remember you opening the freezer."

Tony distinctly remembers that too. He'd chosen to hide his face in an empty blast of cold air instead of making eye contact with Peter when he said what he'd said next.

"I joked around, I remember that." Peter scratches his brow. "I asked you if you were looking for your will to live in the fridge. And then you turned around and…"

And he'd blurted out "I love you, Pete, thought you should know that," so suddenly that Peter had turned to stare at him with the hot water still running over his hands. Tony had waited a second before retreating from the freezer and quipping, "Nope, I was looking for yours. Now where's the dish towel?" as if nothing had happened at all.

And it might as well have been that way, because neither of them had mentioned the incident for months and months afterward.

"Well," Tony says, "I remember that now. But I--but I wanted to say it again, better this time. 'Cause you deserve to hear it face-to-face, obviously."

Peter gives in to a half-smirk. "Obviously."

"Yeah-huh, smartass, well _obviously_ I love you even if you're an insufferable little martyr in underoos."

"And _obviously_ I love you back even though you're old and stubborn and never know when to go to sleep."

"Six point five outta ten, kid. Gotta work on your insult skills. I'm expecting solid eights and nines by Thanksgiving break."

Peter snorts so hard his nose burns. "Thanks. I need to go to the bathroom."

Neither of them budge in acknowledgement of Peter's random topic change, until Tony finally acts like the responsible one and nudges Peter off his lap with one knee.

Peter flips onto his feet with the grace of a baby cow. "You're the worst person in the world," he hisses as he stumbles down the hallway.

"Hate you too," Tony stage whispers back.

\--

Peter swallows back a yelp when he pushes open the bathroom door and finds MJ curled up on top of the toilet seat, illuminated by the eerie cerulean glow of her phone.

"MJ, what the heck, have you been in here for twenty minutes?"

"Seemed like a bad time to interrupt you and your dad's declarations of love," says MJ. She barely looks up from her scrolling. "Also, I figured I didn't need the light on. Save some electricity."

Peter schools his sheepish expression before flicking on the light. He turns on the tap and splashes some water on his face and neck. When he comes back up with a grope for the towel to dry himself off, MJ wordlessly presses the mass of cotton in his hand.

She watches him in silence for a minute and uncurls her feet from the toilet seat as she does so.

"I didn't mean to make fun of you guys, in case I offended you," she says. There is, miraculously, the hint of something unsure in her tone. Inquisitive, even, or apologetic.

Peter dabs at his brow. "Yeah, I know. Thanks. I just needed to, uh, to--jet outta there after all that, y'know? Take a breather."

"Right." MJ nods. "Emotions are exhausting."

"Exactly!" (No, Peter's voice decidedly does not squeak on the middle syllable.) "You get that, right, MJ?"

She purses her lips. She glances down at her phone one more time, then clicks it off. "I mean, if we're gonna get some emotional conversations out of the way, though, I should probably tell you this and get it over with. While, y'know, you're being held hostage in your own bathroom." She cracks a shaky little smile.

Peter chuckles back in confusion. "Uh, okay. Sure?"

The girl pauses to actually take a deep breath. Peter's never seen her do that before. "You're mad at me going to Harvard instead of MIT, aren't you?"

Pete's brow furrows. He wobbles his head from side to side and snaps the sides of his t-shirt to get the air flowing. It's suddenly gotten congested in here.

"Um...no? Totally not. Obviously you're going there because that was your top choice, not MIT. And I'm super duper proud of you."

"Guess 'mad' was a strong word. I meant that we were always imagining we'd go to college together, the three of us." MJ pauses. "Well, four of us, since Keener joined the crew."

Peter's wide eyes fall flat with realization. "MJ--MJ, is this about--that? 'Cause you know we'll always visit you. And of course you can hop on over to us. We won't be far away at all. It's actually a win-win, 'cause you're doing the degree you wanted most and we're all in the same state and there's weekends and breaks and we still live in the same hometown, so--"

"That's--" MJ inhales sharply, interrupting Peter's rant. "You know that's not what I meant." 

Peter leans his hip against the counter. Chews his lip. The truth is, he does know what she means. After a second, he pulls himself up to perch on the bathroom counter and swings his legs out, nudging her elbow with his toe to get her attention.

"You know Harley would never replace you," he says softly. Genuinely. So much so that MJ turns her head away to give herself a minute to blink and to breathe.

"Yeah, I know," she mutters thickly. "Hay-boy hasn't got anything on my scintillating personality."

She can practically hear the toothy grin in Peter's huff.

Finally, bravely, she drags her gaze back up to Peter's. The look she finds there is too warm, too open, too honest. How she loves and hates how Peter can dismantle anyone's defenses in a glance and make them feel--feel-- _wanted_.

"Promise me, though."

"Yeah, I promise."

"I mean _really_ promise. No matter what happens or what you find out about me."

"'Course, MJ. Pinky promise." Peter shoots out his pinky in the same breath, and they curl their fingers around each other. "Wh-what, what is this about? You suddenly turned radioactive and we got another vigilante on the loose? Is it--is it the rise of the Spiderwoman? Mothgirl? Spinnerette--"

"Shut up, Parker. Just shut up." MJ doesn't know where her little grin popped out of, but it aches and it's almost blinding and, she decides, she quite likes it there on her face tonight.

"Have it your way, then. Keep your secrets." Peter points two fingers at his eyes and then hers. "Now that just means you've gotta come over twice as often so I can keep my eight eyes on you."

She rolls her eyes. "You don't have eight eyes. You barely use your two."

"Well, you gotta hang around and make sure Ned doesn't sully my honor--"

"Not my problem."

" _And_ you gotta be present every single time me and Tony have another emotionally constipated conversation about our, about our _feelings_."

MJ's answering smile is wolfish. "Oh, hell, yeah, I can do that."

Peter grins back. Everything hurts, just a little bit, but they're telling themselves and each other it'll all be okay. It always is, even after the end of the world and the second chances and the rebuilding of the universe, galaxy by galaxy.

"You're a real good friend, MJ."

Another eyeroll. "You're my best friend, Peter."

"I know."

"Dickhead."

"Thanks."

"Turn off the light before you run up May's bill again."

"Aye, aye, sucker."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was totally intending to post this all as a 10k-word beast, but then the birthday party scene got much longer than expected and coasted to a natural stopping point. The next half will finally see the four kiddos in college.
> 
> Up next: Peter is a homesick boi, Ned doesn't know how to open up about stress, Harley has an emotional upheaval and MJ has interesting news to share. All wrapped up in gooey mushy love and happy endings because old age has made me weak.
> 
> The genre of this whole piece is...difficult to describe? A character study of multiple characters but also just self-indulgent dialogues between my faves? What do you think, guys?! :D lemme know what you think and I will love you with all my tiny soul :3 
> 
> Oh! And! Give it up for yet another piece written entirely on my phone!! I have no arms leffffft <3 -kaleb
> 
> Muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> Muh insta: kc.barrie
> 
> [Pinterest moodboard for this story](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/under-the-stars-of-orion/)


	2. Act II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter chuckles through his nose. “Hey, Tony?”
> 
> “Yeah, kid?”
> 
> Peter doesn’t answer. 
> 
> A while passes and then Tony prompts him again: “How’re you feeling, Peter?”
> 
> “Unstable,” Peter whispers into the smoky night. He digs the heel of his palm into his eye. “Like--like things are changing and I don’t know forward or backward and...I don’t know how I’m _supposed_ to feel.”
> 
> Tony blows out a breath. “There’s no one way you’re _supposed_ to feel.”
> 
> “My brain knows that,” says Peter. “But it helped so much, when I was living with Aunt May and I--and there was somebody to feel something else for. I knew what I was supposed to do, what I was supposed to say when he--when Ben died. I was supposed to be the one that smiled and said it was gonna be okay somehow.”
> 
> “Oh.” Tony exhales again, and then again, louder this time. “Oh, Pete.” And there’s a click in his voice that says that he’s finally caught on.
> 
> “It’s so big, Mr. Stark,” Peter says. He hasn’t called Tony that in a long time, not in a way that says he means it. Not in a way that’s not a joke or a tease. Not in a way that sounds this vulnerable.
> 
> “I know how you feel,” Tony whispers back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the encouraging response to the first chapter! It honestly spurred me to work really hard on the rest of the story and come up with way more material in way less time than I would've imagined. :) As a result, though, some scenes had to be relegated to a new and third chapter, which should be the final final part of this fic.
> 
> Trigger warnings for this chapter: vague descriptions of a panic attack, super vague mentions of dissociation, and brief discussions of bulimia and depression in a matter-of-fact but not explicit or descriptive way.
> 
> Instrumental tracks I listened to on repeat while writing this angsty bad boi: ["Younger" by Tony Anderson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4U_Pk3VH6Q)  
> ["Dawn" by Landwerm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvP4vILQqmI)  
> ["Swedish Garden" by Brice Davoli](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d83dHVM4zyM)
> 
> Please stay safe, and I hope you enjoy the read! <3

Move-in day is, against all odds, rainy and dark and full of mud and--to put it in Peter’s succinct and perennial expression-- _gross_.

They all go up to fix Peter’s room first because of course Mrs. Leeds shoos them out of Ned’s so she can mop, dust and disinfect the entire tissue-sized space. Harley bounds inside the already cramped double and flings his duffel bag onto Peter’s bed with a hoot and his arms up, clearly having no intention of moving even though he and Pete aren’t even roommates. May and Tony argue passionately about why the school-issued wardrobe looks off-balance (it’s definitely off-balance) (Ned points out that the last person in the room broke a linoleum tile and shoved too much Dannon-brand cardboard under the corner of the wardrobe to make up for it) while Peter glances around for snoopers, lifts the bed with one arm and hisses at Harley to hurry up and slip in the bed-risers. 

Mrs. Leeds pops her head back in with a beatific smile that beckons Ned over to his room down the hall _right this second, anak, bilis, bilis_ , and Tony slaps a Capri Sun or two in Ned’s arms before the kid traipses out, hollering after him to “make friends with your new roomie and make sure not to third-wheel him too much! Make Papa proud!!” Around the same time a bespectacled wisp of an Asian kid stumbles in, and Peter blinks because _oh_ , this must be his roommate and he is instantly getting cool vibes from this guy, so oops, there goes his resolution to never stutter around another cool person again.

Tony is still tossing out Capri Suns like an absolute suburban embarrassment of a dad. “Juice packs for everybody! Keep the blood sugar up, c’mon guys, we haven’t got all day to hem and haw at your sixty-seven pairs of shoes, chop-chop.”

Peter drags at his straw with a snorkeling sound. “Just because _you_ have sixty-seven pairs of wingtips doesn’t mean we have to suffer and hear about it every day.”

Tony points at him with one hand, the other laden with Peter’s definitely-not-Thor-or-Mjölnir-themed bath towels. “I resent the implication that I would be caught dead in wingtips in twenty-nineteen.”

“Is that--are you actually Tony Stark?” says the new kid--Charlie--Charlathan-- _it’s a portmanteau of my parents’ names, they’re called Charlotte and Nathan and they’re super lame_ \--well, turns out he has a stutter too.

“The one and only,” May huffs breathlessly, hands on her hips. She shoves a rolled-up poster at Tony’s chest and jerks her head toward the wall near Peter’s bed. “Make yourself useful.”

“Is nobody going to acknowledge how I’m the single person in this entire room with bad knees and a prosthetic?”

\--

They have lunch at the greasy and thunderous cafeteria eight minutes away, with all the other harried-looking parents, because of course they do. It’s a rite of passage.

“Your roommate looks like if you and Ned fused Steven Universe-style and added Clark Kent glasses,” is the first thing Harley says to break his approximate hour of silence, as he flicks a slice of jalapeño at Peter’s ear.

The other boy rolls his eyes. “His name is _Charlie_ and no, I will _not_ be your wingman.”

“The heck you take me for, Parker? No way I’m calling him Charlie. My sister’s name is Charlie. That’s just invitin’ two billion peachy disasters and, like, a Snapchat humiliation.”

May points her fork at Harley. “Then just start calling her Charlize like she’s been asking you to for the last ‘two billion’ years.”

Harley gives them all a look. “ _Nein_.”

“It’s what the person wants to be called, Harls, how hard can it be?” Tony adds with a gesture of his sloppy burger.

“I’d rather die,” says Harley.

Ned sticks a finger up in the air. “Mr. Stark, if I may--”

Tony blinks at him. “Yes, Fred?” he says with a deadpan face, completely proving himself to the contrary.

\--

Ned signs up for about four different a cappella auditions during the club fair on move-in day, along with the badminton club, the swimming club and the biweekly knitting meet-up. Harley leaves his info with the library reps for the work-study program and flicks a brow upward in mild interest at the poster for theater tryouts, before disappearing somewhere with the cryptic text that he’ll be back at their dorm in time for dinner--a sure sign that he’s off in, like, the basement of the science hall to start rehearsing his _to be or not to be_ monologue.

Peter grabs a bunch of brochures and free pens and shirts and nods at an awful lot of people but ends up signing up for nothing because--well, crime never sleeps and sure, he’s not in New York anymore but the overwhelming anxiety of _what if?_ still nags at him at the back of his head. His non-academic schedule would have to be clear at all times.

Ned clocks his facial expression in three seconds flat.

“Dude, you can’t Spider-Man out here!”

Peter flicks a balled-up piece of notebook paper shreds at him. “Say it louder for the people in the back, why don’t you.”

“Oops. Sorry. What I meant is, you can’t just--you know--” Ned makes ineffective gestures and Spidey hand movements. “You know, _thwip-thwip_ around campus. This is college. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, Peter. You gotta focus on yourself for once.”

“I dunno, Ned, I don’t even know what I’d focus on if I had all that time to myself.”

Ned huffs out a sigh. “You used to love robotics. And game coding. Oh! I bet there’s a whole bunch of people out here who love D&D unironically! We should totally check Facebook and see if they have a group up already. We could both go together!”

“Sure, D&D,” Peter mumbles, a little embarrassed, because it’s not a shabby suggestion at all. 

“Oh, gee, wow, I’m overwhelmed with your enthusiasm.”

Peter slows in their lope across campus to walk backwards and face Ned as he pokes his fingers at the corners of his own mouth and props them up in an exaggerated grin. “D&D! Yeah! Fucking get on our level of nerd, guys!”

Ned spits out a half-giggle, half-snort and pauses for breath when a girl in a purple tank top and red glasses whoops and waves back at them from across the quad.

“There’s your next paladin, Peter.”

Peter hikes his backpack up higher on his shoulders and, still trudging up the hill backwards, points finger guns at Ned. “I’m only in it if you start playing somebody other than a bard.”

“Dude,” Ned whines. “It’s my comfort zone.”

“ _Dude_ ,” Peter singsongs back. “No deal if you don’t break outta your comfort zone. Once-in-a-lifetime college experience, right?”

Ned heaves an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. Deal. No comfort zone. I’ll go for, like, barbarian.”

“ _Hell_ yeah, that’s my man!” Peter whoops and fistpumps the air. He stumbles a little, not having realized (despite all Peter-tingles, thank you very much, MJ, Tony, May, you may shut up now) that he’s run into the steps leading up to the library behind him. Ned rolls his eyes and catches him, and then the next thing Peter knows Ned has caught his fists in the air with his own hands and clutched them dramatically to his chest, and he’s leaning in for a kiss.

Despite all his misgivings from that morning and the little knot of emptiness that was beginning to grow inside him as he waved May and Tony off from the parking lot, Peter feels the tension start to leave him for the first time all day as he and Ned breathe together there on the steps of the library in their own pocket of awareness. No one hoots or whistles as they pass by--no one _knows_ them, from before and after the getting-together--and it strangely means more to Peter than he ever imagined it would. It feels liberating. Weightless.

Peter mumbles against Ned’s mouth, “I promised MJ I’d have her come over stat to watch us and make sure you don’t sully my honor. Now look what you’ve done.”

Ned shoves him backward with a grin. “Fuck _off_.”

\--

Peter can’t sleep on his first night of college. This is not new--their friends who didn’t get Blipped and managed to get through the four years of university with an extra side of hell told him it’s expected, it’s practically another rite of passage, not to be able to sleep on the night of move-in day. Learning to sleep in new places and all that.

He hears the hollers of kids outside still hanging out on the cobblestones, grasping at the last hours of freedom before orientation and then school and then an avalanche of anxiety start up. The A/C unit buzzes by his ear, because apparently his roommate Charlie gets hot easily and can’t sleep with the windows up and the air conditioning off. Even after Peter flips himself upside-down on his bed with his feet to the unit and his pillow tented over his head, it does practically nothing to mitigate the low-grade drone of voices, crickets, skateboards, the shower downstairs, the freaking blast of cold air on his bare toes.

The noise-cancelling headphones that Tony pressed into his palm earlier are still sitting in his backpack under a mountain of granola bars and DVDs. He could--he _should_ \--just get up and put them on. 

But that would feel quite irrationally like giving up on his first day away from home, like reaching for his safety blanket when it’s time to leave the Shire, not learning to spread his wings, all that jazz.

He tosses and turns and resists the urge to scroll through Instagram again, because he knows that in spite of his super-healing the blue light strain on his eyes will give him a headache in the morning.

A part of him knows the real reason why he’s like this, why certain sounds and lights and smells are triggers of unhappier times for him. The A/C unit roars on like the sound of the hotel from when he and May spent weeks on the road without an apartment. The squeak and the bang of the bathroom door down the hall sends him hurtling through images of endless hallways, of nights spent lying reclined in the passenger seat of the station wagon and listening to May’s breathing as she lay across the back seat, and both of them pretended to not know the other was awake. Lost in grief that felt too distant to be fair, because Ben had just died, but they could not even grasp the smell of him in the unit they had just lost.

Peter briefly puts his earbuds in--then thinks better of it, knowing he’ll just push himself into a deeper spiral if he turns on the sad music now. Instead, he flicks over to WhatsApp and opens up his conversation again with MJ.

_**Pooter Porker:** Roomie done serenading you?_

_**Michael Jackson:** god yes finally. i think she’s bingeing jane the virgin now. i support all artistic endeavors but her guitar needs tuning_

_i’ll probably do it for her tomorrow while she’s in the shower_

_**Pooter Porker:** Haha I was about to ask who are you and what have you done with MJ if you’re offering to help her but then you said that. Always the secret chaotic do-gooder_

_**Michael Jackson:** i am neither chaotic nor a do-gooder_

_i am neutral and extremely evil_

_can’t sleep?_

_**Pooter Porker:** Lol nopppe. Charlie’s sleeping half naked and I’m over here by the AC like a popsicle_

_**Michael Jackson:** classic roomie fight_

_i just opened the window and told her the sound of the ac gives me hives. and i gave her a v particular look_

_**Pooter Porker:** Ohh scary. Traumatizing the roomie already_

_Hey_

_MJ_

Peter pauses and bites his lip.

_**Michael Jackson:** yeah? spit it out_

_**Pooter Porker:** Are you scared ?_

_**Michael Jackson:** of repercussions? never._

_if you’re talking about college, we can totally vid chat and stress together. fair warning i got my charcoal mask on_

_**Pooter Porker:** Not about that life :P_

_And no I’m not scared of college_

_Stop projecting_

Peter types a couple of different follow-up messages, but finds himself wholly incapable of articulating what he wants to say. Sure, he would love to call MJ right now; she’s probably the most level-headed of his friend group who wouldn’t jump into over-mothering mode at the mention of what’s triggering him. Still, he has not told anyone outside Tony about his and May’s stint with homelessness. Not even Ned, who probably has an inkling of what was going on at time but is a bit fuzzy on the details because Peter sort of dropped off the face of the earth when he was grieving over Ben.

In the end, MJ is the one who rescues him.

_**Michael Jackson:** it’s totally fine if you don’t feel like video call rn. you can just say it yk. contrary to popular belief i am a v cool person and do not get easily offended at all_

_**Pooter Porker:** Thanks MJ. Maybe tomorrow tho. Definitely tomorrow. We could do a lunch chat with the guys if you want !_

_**Michael Jackson:** yeah i want_

_**Pooter Porker:** Okee, it’s a date!_

_**Michael Jackson:** into foursomes now?_

_not about that life :P_

_;) ;)_

_**Pooter Porker:** OMG GO WATCH THE BAKE OFF OR SOMETHING_

_GOOD NIGHT_

_I MEAN IT THIS TIME_

Without waiting to see MJ’s reply anymore, lest he get sucked into confessing to her what’s going on in his head, Peter clicks his phone off, kicks off the sheets and jumps down onto the freezing linoleum. He pads over to the door and creaks it open against a stab of halogen light. Though there are voices all around, nobody else on his floor comes out of their rooms to intercept him on his way to the window at the stairwell. Just a duck through the window and a hop over the sill, and he’s standing barefoot on the rusty fire escape.

He makes the mistake of closing his eyes and breathing in. The next thing he knows, the rustle of the summer leaves and the punch of smoke and night air have morphed into something else entirely, and the wave of emptiness and nothing roars over him till there is only an ice left in his bones. It’s an infinite cold, and it settles deep within him, tearing little by little at his chest with the blade of loneliness.

Peter fumbles for his phone and dials Tony without hesitation.

The man picks up on the third ring, which tells Peter he was awake and waiting for his call but didn’t want to seem overly desperate.

“Hey, kiddo. Ain’t it bedtime yet for the Spider-Babies?”

There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about Tony’s voice--a bit gravelly, soft on the vowels, as if Tony is speaking lazily while slumped in bed next to a sleeping Pepper, with his chin tucked into his chest. And yet Peter suddenly finds his eyes and tongue wet and quaking when he opens his mouth to speak, and so he doesn’t. He latches onto the railing of the fire escape and he doesn’t let go until he feels it groaning underneath his fingers.

“Pete?”

“Sorry, sorry, I’m here,” Peter rasps out. “I--got a little shocked by how old your voice sounds, is all.” He offers a breathless cackle.

The boy picks up the staticky rustle of sheets being shuffled around. So he was right--Tony is sitting up in bed.

“Where are you, kid? What’s up?”

Peter presses the phone closer to his ear, not because he needs the speaker any nearer to him to hear Tony’s voice properly, but because it’s the only thing he can do, he can _think_ of to do, to close the gap between them. His hand shakes. First his left one that’s gripping the phone, and then the right, and he slides down the railing and shoves his fingers between his thighs.

He teaches himself all over again how to breathe. One in, one out. Two in, two out, three in, three out--and over.

He finds to his horror that his very throat is trembling and he cannot speak.

Tony’s voice is stronger now, but no less soft. “Just tell me if you’re safe, Pete.”

“Yeah,” Pete whispers. “Yeah. I am. Yeah.”

“Okay, bud, we can work with that. We can work with that.”

Strangely, Tony doesn’t launch into the verbal portion of their breathing exercises, but Peter’s hearing has returned to something more stable in the last few minutes and so he can pick up the exaggerated inhale and exhale of the man on the other end of the line. He takes his cue from Tony and matches the pace of his breaths to his mentor’s until the shudder in his lungs loses its edge and subsides.

“Was it--” Tony sounds like he’s licking his lips. “Was it, was it something you saw or heard? Is everything okay in your room?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s fine, it wasn’t Titan,” Peter rushes to explain. And again, a little quieter: “Not Titan. I promise.”

“I believe you.”

“Thank you.”

“D’you wanna tell me about it, then?”

Peter raises his thumb to his mouth and bites down on his hangnail viciously. “Could you just--you know that show you and Pepper were watching? The one you were telling us about in the car? I wasn’t--I wasn’t listening. Could you just...talk to me about that for a second?”

Only the blip of a moment passes, and then Tony launches into a shaky retelling without questioning Peter’s request. He rambles, starting with the finale of the latest season he and Pepper have caught up on, and he traces his way meanderingly back to the pilot where the characterization of the best friend is surprisingly less cheap than he would have expected. He throws in Pepper’s sagacious comments about these particular writers taking diversity into account. Waxes a little passionate, in his low and rough voice, about how great it is to be able to have the show on while Mo-mo runs in and out of the room, because it’s family friendly and it teaches a more accurate history than most anything else he’s seen.

When there’s a lull in the monologue and the shift in the buzzing of the air from Tony’s end seems to signal that the man has moved to the kitchen or the lab, Peter unclenches his jaw and opens his eyes again. He sees the drop of blood where he bit down too hard on his hangnail, and he wipes it off on the knee of his pajamas.

“Look at you,” Peter croaks. “Watching family-friendly shows.”

“’Course,” Tony retorts without missing a beat. “It seems, uh, I’ve acquired a whole bunch of infants in recent years. Despite what the press thinks, I don’t make a habit of going around and corrupting the youth.”

Peter chuckles through his nose. “Hey, Tony?”

“Yeah, kid?”

Peter doesn’t answer. 

A while passes and then Tony prompts him again: “How’re you feeling, Peter?”

“Unstable,” Peter whispers into the smoky night. He digs the heel of his palm into his eye. “Like--like things are changing and I don’t know forward or backward and...I don’t know how I’m _supposed_ to feel.”

Tony blows out a breath. “There’s no one way you’re _supposed_ to feel.”

“My brain knows that,” says Peter. “But it helped so much, when I was living with Aunt May and I--and there was somebody to feel something else for. I knew what I was supposed to do, what I was supposed to say when he--when Ben died. I was supposed to be the one that smiled and said it was gonna be okay somehow.”

“Oh.” Tony exhales again, and then again, louder this time. “Oh, Pete.” And there’s a click in his voice that says that he’s finally caught on.

“It’s so big, Mr. Stark,” Peter says. He hasn’t called Tony that in a long time, not in a way that says he means it. Not in a way that’s not a joke or a tease. Not in a way that sounds this vulnerable.

“I know how you feel,” Tony whispers back. “Shit, I--when I started college, you know this, I told you this, right? I was fifteen. It was all like, oh, look at the wonder child, so privileged and--and he can get into the finest schools ahead of his grade and _isn’t he the example to emulate?_ And all that bullshit.”

“I remember,” says Peter. In the next dorm over, a girl in the top floor has turned on her light and opened the window to sit on the sill and strum her guitar. He thinks of MJ’s roommate, and he thinks of MJ, too, and wonders how fucking scared she is.

“It’s when there’s nobody around to expect you to behave a certain way, that’s when you feel lost,” Tony says.

“Yeah, that’s--that’s pretty much like--yeah, no, that’s exactly it.”

“Then you should know it’s okay to be sad for a little while, bud.”

“But I don’t want to let myself be sad, because then I won’t know how to stop and I’ll sink too deep before I can catch myself.” And on his last few syllables Peter’s voice cracks.

Tony’s answering tone is slow and melancholy. “Pete. You don’t have to catch yourself.”

“Yes, I do. I always have. I always have to.”

“Pete,” Tony says says again. “ _You don’t have to catch yourself_. I’ll be there. We’ll all be there.”

Peter mumbles around a hiccup, “How will you know?”

“Because we always do.” It sounds almost like Tony is calming the beat of his own heart, and then: “’Cause isn’t that what parents do?”

Peter’s face is wet.

“Don’t say anything yet,” Tony says. “Just--take a minute. It’s all right. It’s okay. Just...breathe.”

Peter obeys. He shuffles around on his side against the railing until he can tilt his head comfortably at the sky. There are clouds there, strips of pewter and ivory against the reluctant gibbous moon. They conceal the stars, but from here he can still make out some of his favorite constellations winking at him, if he just imagines hard enough.

“Hey, Tony,” he says. “Guess what. I can see Orion from here.”

“No, you can’t,” Tony shoots back with a tiny grin. “It’s August.”

“Yeah, I can. Orion never disappears, you just gotta look a little harder in the off seasons.”

Tony’s voice loses its teasing edge. “Yeah? So you found him?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I can see him, three stars, there’s the belt…” Peter’s mind returns with a burst of clarity, and it shows in his next few words. “He’s the one I can always find, no matter what time of year. He’s the constant one.”

“Huh,” Tony breathes out. “Hey, you’re--wait. You’re right. I do see him.”

Peter’s heart skips with painful elation. “You on the balcony?”

“Sure, squirt. I needed my own angsty fire escape.”

“...How did you know I was on a fire escape?”

“Well, as loath as I am to admit it, your Aunt Rigatoni is constantly telling me we’re two sides of the same coin. Where d’you think I headed when I needed to have a dramatic meltdown in college?”

Peter grins into the speaker. “A fire escape. To look up at the stars.”

“Yeah, kid.” Tony’s voice softens. “To look up at the stars.”

\--

“What do you think?” Peter swivels to show Ned the third pair. “Clark Kent enough?”

“Nope. Too square for your face.”

A fourth pair goes on. Peter spins with finger guns. “How ’bout now?”

“A bit too...Ted Danson?”

Peter scoffs and lays a hand over his chest in mock offense. “Okay, okay, fine. How about...this one?”

An upturned plastic pair in some questionable shade of periwinkle blue goes up. With jazz hands, this time.

Ned scrunches up his nose. “Jesus, now it’s Adrian from _Rocky_.”

“I think her glasses were perfect,” MJ comments, waving her wrist and snapping her fingers. “That movie, although it was forgivable for its other faults, did _not_ treat feminine beauty outside the box.”

“No no, wait, what about this one?” says Harley, picking up a gray tortoise-shell option and shoving it on Peter’s nose.

Ned cocks his head to the side. “It’s actually not horrendous.”

“Always took you for a warm-tones guy, but it’s decent,” MJ says with a judicious nod. She shifts her belt bag so she can cross her arms more easily across her chest and lean away, the picture of practiced insouciance.

Peter checks his own reflection in the mirror and tries a dorky smile. He wobbles his head from side to side. “Okay, it’s actually good.”

Harley bows with a flourish, while Ned slow claps from his perch on the padded bench. “Gotta say, Harls, you don’t make a bad Queer Eye.”

Peter pretends to frown. “Harley may be queer, but I don’t know about him having eyes.”

“Hey!” Harley takes a swipe at Peter’s arm, but the other boy dodges it easily with a laugh.

MJ rolls her eyes at them, which only goes to show just how fond she’s gotten of her idiot trio. The more annoyance she shows, the softer she’s grown. “So. Are you getting those or what? We need to hit the movies soon.”

They all debate briefly on a last-minute option from another rack. In the end, Peter falls back on Harley’s original choice, and they leave the fashion glasses kiosk with a newly bespectacled Spider-Teen who absolutely did _not_ consent to these photos, _stop sending them to May and Tony_ , oh my _God_.

May and Tony’s texts come in with an almost simultaneous chirp.

 _Thanks for bullying him into my favorite look. There’s the Petey I missed before Spidey_ , May wrote.

And Tony’s positively atrocious enthusiasm: _WHAT DID I TELL YOU. TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN, SPIDER-DIAPERS_.

“What,” says Ned. 

“What,” says Harley in acquiescence.

“At least I _have_ another side to my coin,” Peter says petulantly, “and it’s Iron Man. Who wears glasses. Y’all haven’t even got coins.”

“I’d go into how problematic that was, but it’s Saturday and I haven’t had a pretzel yet,” says MJ.

They troop off to Auntie Anne’s and head off in a gaggle right after to the theater upstairs. Ned swears under his breath as he picks the sesame seeds off his pretzel and accidentally scatters them all over the escalator. Peter tries and fails to look mad at him--a usual occurrence with his already built-in baby face, but an especially frequent phenomenon around his boyfriend. When they start breaking off pieces of their different-flavored pretzels and feeding each other, Harley and MJ stop watching and march off with highly exaggerated disgust.

“So glad we’re single and miserable,” Harley groans.

“ _So_ glad,” MJ agrees, and she graces him with a fist bump.

They argue in the queue about which film to see, because it’s them and of course they do. Peter refuses to have any action rated R or with gunfire, for obvious reasons; Harley declares he will not touch another irreverently done Western with a ten-foot pole. MJ cites indifference on the grounds that she’s a “Netflix kid through and through anyway” but comes alive to debate their options when Ned so much as begins to suggest the Avengers-inspired dramedy.

“It’s basically a biopic with corny puns,” MJ points out. “Everyone knows how biopics start out too ambitious and end up telling harmful half-truths.”

Peter slurps his Dr. Pepper pensively. “Y’know, I met the guy who plays Tony,” he mumbles around the straw. “It was at a gala before everyone got Blipped. Poor guy got Blipped too, I heard. Anyway. Not the point of the story. It was right after my internship started so I wasn’t, like, super close to Tony, I guess? And you know how everyone’s pretty much wearing the same thing at those events, black suit, black tie, the whole shebang, right?”

“I know you, Parker, and I know this ends in a disaster without you sayin’ another word,” says Harley. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Ned snorts. Peter rolls his eyes and continues. “So Tony leaves me alone at the bar for a minute to talk to someone important, right--”

“He left you at a bar?” Ned interrupts.

“He left you to talk to someone else?” MJ interjects.

“Oh my God, you guys. So anyway, a couple minutes pass, I’m sweating there in this ridiculous blue suede jacket he made me wear, then I see him coming back my way, right? It looks like him, it _moves_ like him, I coulda sworn it even smelled like him. He comes up to me and nods at me and orders a scotch on rocks, which, like, okay, that’s weird ’cause Mr. Stark had sworn off drinking by that point, but whatever. I tap him on the arm and I go, ‘Hey, did you go have your makeup retouched or something? Your--your face--it looks kinda different up close.’”

“Sweet niblets,” Harley drawls, as he suavely pulls out his wallet and pays for four tickets for _Detective Pikachu_ because his friends are bickering idiots.

Peter is gesticulating wildly with his cinnamon pretzel in one hand. “And _then_ Mr. Stark himself walks up at that exact second. He doesn’t even have to know what we were talking about to know already what’s going on. And he was fucking _laughing_ at me, full-on, like, guffawing so hard he couldn’t breathe.”

“Babe,” Ned chokes. “I know you’ve told me, like, a bajillion embarrassing stories about you and Tony--”

“--Don’t know why I do it when you mock my pain--” Peter mutters.

“--Plus I actually _grew up_ with you, so there’s that--”

“ _\--Dude._ ”

“But, like, it’s so hard to figure out now which is my favorite. Oh my God. Oh my _God_.”

“Okay, okay, calm down now, no aneurysms in the theater.”

“Wonder what you would’ve been like if you’d met the guy who plays Spider-Man,” MJ says drily.

“One word,” Harley says, pulling out his phone with a flourish Peter does not trust. He flips the device to show his screen ready with the meme of the two Spideys pointing fingers at each other.

Peter squints at them all. “ _Guys_.”

“I’ve seen so many interviews of his,” Ned gushes. He has the decency to glance askance at Peter with a semblance of atonement. “Sorry, babe. But have you seen him? They made him tall, dark and handsome. Which, I mean, they coulda just named the movie _Edward Leeds_ if they really wanted the leading man to be true to life, but…”

If Peter gasps and shoves him in the shoulder with maybe a tiny ounce of his super-strength, well, nobody needs to know.

And so they stroll into the theater like that, still bantering in stage whispers and bumping into seats on their way (“For the last time, MJ, my Spidey-sense does not work that way.” “Does it work at all?”), until a hot-tempered grandmother with an honest-to-God sewing kit and a pile of knitting in her lap twists around to glare at them and shush them in an even louder whisper.

\--

It’s half past three on a Wednesday afternoon when Peter dashes through the front doors of the library, chucks his backpack into the office chair next to Harley’s and vaults over the counter right after it.

Harley barely looks up from the calc textbook he’s been tapping his pen against for the last ten minutes. “You’re late.”

“Always,” Peter huffs distractedly. He sags back against his chair to actually catch his breath, which he hasn’t needed to do in ages since the spider bite. “Did you clock in for me?”

“Nope.” Harley pops his _p_. “’Cause I’ve got the moral compass of Steven Grant Rogers.”

Peter rolls his head to the side to give him a droll look. “So you clocked me in.”

Harley cups his own cheek and tries to look cute. “Yup. ’Cause I’m your bestestest friend. Where were you?”

“Looking for Ned.” Peter digs for his own calc textbook and tosses it on the counter, then fishes around for a mechanical pencil--which he proceeds to grip too tightly and snap in half. He huffs and grabs another pencil from the library’s stash.

“Oh, wow, you guys finally cut your umbilical cord?”

“Har, har. No.” The other boy squints at the computer and clicks the mouse repeatedly to get it to turn on so he can log in. After about the seventh click, there’s a sickening crack of plastic.

“Shit.”

Harley doesn’t know whether he should be worried or amused. “...You good?”

“Fuck. Shit.”

“There’s infants present,” Harley mutters, pointing at the wide-eyed knot of families being toured around the first-floor facilities by another baby-faced working student. “Did you actually _break_ the mouse?”

Peter doesn’t answer. He unplugs the offending device and chucks it into the bin. He scrounges around in the drawers for a spare, but when his fingers begin to shake too hard for him to properly search for anything, he bangs the drawer shut and drops his head into his hands.

“Woah. Woah, woah, woah. What’s going on? Pete, you okay?”

“I’m _fine_ , Harley,” Peter snaps.

“Yeah, well, doesn’t look like it ’cause you just broke two things in a row and you’re shakin’ like a fucking leaf and I--hey, hey, don’t dig into your eyes so much, you’ll damage them. That’s what Ma always says.”

Reluctantly, Peter obeys. He lowers his hands to the counter. Still, he hunches over and lets his overgrown curls hide the side of his face instead of turning to look at Harley.

“I need to do the problem set for tomorrow,” Peter whispers at the countertop.

Harley sighs. “Honestly, fuck the problem set. What’s going on? C’mon, Parker, gimme something here. I need to know how to help ya.”

Peter picks up his pencil with an obstinate shake of his head. “You don’t need to help me because there’s nothing to be helped. Sorry I sound so--but, uh, you did the problem set already, right?”

“Peter, wouldja just _look at me_ for a damn second.”

The other boy drags his gaze upward. He looks--he looks _ragged_ , scraped, like the human embodiment of stormy highways and broken doors and burnt-up toast crumbs at the bottom of the cookie sheet.

Harley reaches out slowly to ruffle a hand through Peter’s unshorn hair. “What’s goin’ on, huh? Talk to me.”

Peter’s eyes go round and red with pain. “Ned’s not answering my calls or texts. He wasn’t there last night when I knocked, or he didn’t answer, I dunno which, but Jasleen says he was in class this morning. I haven’t had a chance to follow up with him because our schedules run at the same time, and then I realized I hadn’t done the fucking problem set for tomorrow or the, or the volunteer report that we need to turn in for first-year seminar--”

“Done,” says Harley. “We volunteer at the same place, Pete. Lemme do it for you.”

“--No, Harley. Just. No.”

Harley fixes him with a hard stare. “Let me help you, dammit. If I can fix your stress in any way possible, I will. I can’t hunt up your boyfriend for you, probably, but I sure can take a load off your plate.”

“It’s not just that,” Peter says in a small voice, in a beat. For the two of them, it’s enough to be understood as a _thank you_.

“Okay. Sorry I interrupted. Keep going.”

“Um. Just. I heard that May had car trouble this past weekend, which is, like, fine I guess because Tony throws money at us even when we don’t want it and he probably got her a Lexus by now or whatever, but I felt so freaking bad because if I’d been there I could’ve fixed up the car, stat. And then I saw the news feed the other day, and there’s this kidnapping thing going on in Queens, and I’m not _there_ because obviously I’m stuck _here_ sitting on my ass and getting a fucking overpriced education, and on top of this I can’t sleep and my eating habits have been weird and I--I--” Peter cuts himself off when he chokes on his own sob and can’t go on.

Harley bites back the barrage of swear words that rise to his mouth. Instead, he gives a clipped, “Okay, give me your phone.”

Peter stares at him, uncomprehending.

Harley sighs and reaches into Peter’s jacket pocket himself to grab the phone. He slaps it facedown on the counter. “No more checking your news feeds, do you hear me?”

Peter nods.

“I mean it. I’m unplugging you, Peter. You gotta--you gotta be better to yourself. This is meant to be your time, your space. I know it’s hard for you and Tony because you’re his freaking mini-me, but try, okay? Try not to think about Spidey. There’s other heroes out there picking up the slack when you need them to. I promise.”

Peter crumples forward with his elbows on his knees, nodding again. His eyes drift to the computer screen and then stay fixed there, glazing over.

“Hey hey hey _hey_. No dissociatin’ on me, Peter. Can’t get rid of me that easily. Huh? Huh?” Harley grabs for Peter’s hand closest to them and squeezes it. Christ, it’s freezing to the touch.

When Peter doesn’t answer verbally, but simply rests his cheek on the counter to look at him, Harley makes up his mind.

“Enough of this school crap,” Harley says. “C’mon, I’m clocking us out. We need to get you taken care of.”

\--

Peter comes back to himself in the heat and muffled chatter of the gym. He blinks and takes in his surroundings. There’s mirrors, synthetic hardwood floors. Slow rhythms of flutes and leaves and brooks filtering in through the sound system plugged into the wall. They’re in the yoga room.

He doesn’t have to say anything, apparently, for Harley to turn to him with a knowing look that he’s back.

Harley rearranges his arms on his knees where he’s got them pulled up to his chest. He’s seated on another yoga mat next to Peter’s, clearly not doing yoga, and he looks uncomfortable, but he doesn’t complain.

Peter eases himself out of his half-lotus and stretches his legs.

“I’d forgotten about this,” he says thickly.

Harley rubs at his left eye. “I called Mrs. Pepper and asked about her--about her experience with this. Cuz. You know.”

Peter shoots him a vigorous nod. “Yeah. Yeah. She taught me yoga. I forgot how much it helped with my episodes.” And then he cuts himself off with a grimace. “Yikes. I _literally_ spaced out on you. So sorry about that.”

“I’d tell ya to stop apologizing, but we both know you’re the lost cause out of the two of us,” Harley quips. He moves to hold Peter’s ankles as the other boy starts up a random set of sit-ups.

“Still. I should’ve known it would get triggered by the stress. I wasn’t...watchful.”

Harley hums in disagreement. “Being watchful doesn’t mean you won’t experience it. It ain’t your fault, period. Now.” He licks his lips. “What’s this I hear about not eating right, huh?”

“It’s nothing, I--”

“It’s not nothing.” Harley glares at him.

Peter comes up from his sit-up and holds his position there for a second, meeting Harley’s gaze uneasily. He goes back down as he answers. “It’s an old thing I’m working on. I used to be…”

Several seconds pass. Harley waits for him to continue.

“I used to have bulimia. After Ben died, that is. And it’s, uh, it’s kinda exacerbated by the metabolism thing. Sometimes. Not all the time. I actually recovered from it. It’s just...hard to tell when I’m slipping, sometimes, till it’s too late and I’m already headed toward the bottom.”

Harley doesn’t say anything for a while.

Peter drops down against the yoga mat with a final stretch and a huff. He wriggles his socked toes against Harley’s hands. “Harls?”

“I, uh, I get what you mean,” Harley says quietly. He releases Peter’s ankles to flop down on the floor beside Peter. “About the whole eating thing. I think college...in general...sorta messes up people that way. I mean, it can. It sometimes does.”

Peter’s voice cracks with unwilling hopefulness. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Harley nods, his hair rasping against the edge of Peter’s mat. “I was readin’ up on some forums before we moved in. It’s...like, we shouldn’t call it _normal_ , but it happens. Uh, it happens more often than you think.”

Peter chews his lips. And then, softly, so softly Harley almost thinks he imagined it: “Did you get that too?”

The other boy blows out a breath. “Not, like, bingeing and stuff. More like...just not eating because I was too fucking depressed to make myself do anything.”

Peter stills beside him. Despite himself, despite their trust in each other, Harley feels his heartbeat quicken with a thump.

“I didn’t know that,” Peter whispers.

Harley lets out a crazed little laugh. “Well, now you do.”

“ _Harley_ ,” says Peter, and it sounds so small and so sad, and Harley hates himself for making Peter’s voice sound that way.

“It’s all behind me now,” Harley says with a wave of his hand. He crooks his knee up and knocks it against Peter’s. But something tells him his casual gestures cannot belie the telltale rasp in his syllables.

“It’s okay if it isn’t.” Peter inhales deeply. “It’s okay if you need to tell me. I need to--I want to know these things.”

“I take my little gummies and whatnot for it,” Harley lies. “It’s all good.”

“Okay,” says Peter, and Harley can sense he’s rolled over to look at him. “Okay, I trust you.”

And if that one statement doesn’t hurt like a bitch.

So Harley closes his eyes and frowns at the darkness. “See, this is why you’re runnin’ yourself ragged. You’re always looking out for other people. You don’t know how to look out for yourself.”

“I’m Spider-Man,” Peter says immediately, as if this is the panacea for everything. And, oh, if that doesn’t drive a spike through Harley’s chest.

His eyes fly open. He glares at the popcorn ceiling above them, tasting metal sour and heavy in his mouth. “You were Peter before you were Spider-Man, you moron. You never _stopped_ being Peter.”

“But I--” Peter’s tone sounds strangely thick. Grudgingly, Harley turns toward him and finds Peter running his thumbnail along the cracks in the honeycomb pattern of the yoga mat.

Peter tries again. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know how to be Peter anymore,” he whispers, like it’s a secret. “I didn’t _like_ who Peter was before Spidey came along. Then the thing bit me, I became strong, and it was like--it was like God or something was giving me a second chance to be better.”

“But, Pete,” Harley whispers back, “you still got the heart and brain of Peter in there.”

Peter swipes suspiciously at his eyes with the back of his hand. He seems to be muttering angrily at himself, probably for crying, for Christ’s sake. He curls his legs back up into his favorite cross-legged formation.

“Forget this bullshit about second chances. You never needed a second chance. You never did anything _wrong_. Now.” Harley blinks up at Peter. “Repeat after me: _I am Peter Parker and I am allowed to feel things_.”

“Jesus Christ,” Peter chokes.

“It’s a lil clunky. I’m workin’ on it.” Harley waves his hand. “C’mon. _I am Peter Parker and I am allowed to feel things_. Say it.”

“I am Peter Parker and I am allowed to feel things,” Peter mumbles.

“Louder this time. With feeling.”

“ _I am Peter Parker and I am allowed to feel things_.”

“You’re gettin’ there. Again. Really fucking feel it, Parker.”

“ _I am Peter Parker and I am allowed to feel things_!”

“Yeah! Hell yeah!”

“Fuck you,” Peter says with a wet laugh. “Should’ve never let you join theater.”

“Say it again!”

“Okay, okay! I got it!”

“You really got it?”

“I really got it.” Peter meets his gaze. “I mean it, Harls. I really got it. Thank you.”

“All in a day’s work,” Harley quips. “And don’t forget. What’re we gonna do about the eating?”

Peter hedges. “...Text Tony when it happens?”

“Text Tony when it happens,” Harley confirms. “Or me. I’m probably kinda useless, but you can always text me.”

Peter frowns and nudges Harley in the ribs with his toe. “You’re not useless.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, genius.”

“No, but you’re always doing that.” Pete gestures roundly. “Saying...negative stuff about yourself.”

“Nothin’ to worry about here, Spidey-Tighties,” Harley assures him with a tight grin. “You just worry about finding your boyfriend and having a good heart-to-heart. I’ll be good.”

Peter stretches out his legs so they drape across Harley’s chest. Harley unconsciously moves to massage the other kid’s toes.

“You sure, Harley? You can trust me with anything.”

“I’m sure, Pete.” Harley swallows. “And I trust you.”

“Okay. Then I trust you.”

Harley has to close his eyes at that, because the guilt bearing down in him is heavy and blinding and he finds more comfort in the darkness. Not today. He will not give in to it today.

“So I was thinking gyros, us three, seven tonight, after you’ve fixed up your trouble in paradise…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So you see, I had to cut off the chapter at the end of the yoga scene because it set up the climax for the third part so well. Up next: Ned opens up to Peter about what's bothering him, and Peter offers him a shoulder to lean on. Meanwhile, Harley starts to spiral back into depression and comes to terms with some hard truths about his future. Surprisingly, MJ helps him out, and he in turn helps her out with her struggles with her sexuality.
> 
> The fic that talks about the time Peter told Tony about him and May being homeless is ["You Won't Notice the Fall."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15739209) The one where Pepper teaches Peter yoga to combat dissociation is called ["Sometimes We're Holding Angels."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15269226)
> 
> Comments and honest feedback will literally breathe manic energy into my dark, empty soul and drive me to finish part 3 even faster. Any and all reactions are voraciously welcomed!! I love you all!! <3 -kaleb


	3. Act III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next thing he knows, Harley is on the rooftop of a parking garage and his hands are shaking and he has, somehow, somewhere, by some force of terrible nature, dialed Peter.
> 
> It’s half past three. Nobody should be awake at this godforsaken hour.
> 
> Peter answers on the fifth ring. His voice lilts from being pulled from sleep. But he’s there, he sounds present, to Harley he vaguely feels--aware. “Harley?”
> 
> “You told me to trust you,” is what Harley says instead of _hello_ , or _I’m sorry_ , or _I need to talk_. “I trust you.”
> 
> Out of everything, months down the line, out of the nights that blur together in his memory from the sameness of his pain or erase themselves from his mind out of numbness, it will be this one fact that he will return to that he knows with certainty. That he opened his mouth and all that came out was _I trust you_ , and that it was right and true because nothing could be righter or truer about him and Peter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's the biggest oofie.
> 
> Trigger warnings: discussions of depression and suicidal thoughts, which start with the line _She takes a slurp. “What’s going on?” It’s spoken more like a statement, not a question_ , and ends with the line _Present and comforting, and terrifying in its power, and beautiful._ Please scroll to the endnotes for a summary of the possibly triggering scenes. I want you to stay happy and safe, my lovelies!! <3
> 
> Songs I listened to while writing this: ["You Say" by Lauren Daigle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIaT8Jl2zpI&vl=en)  
> ["Slow Your Breath Down" by Future of Forestry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepUzgAnlzs)

Peter taps his index finger against the strap of his backpack as the last couple of chords fade in and out through the wall he is leaned against. If he tries hard enough, he can pick apart the voices--the alto twins, that one Nigerian guy who does all the funky beatboxing sounds, the guy from Kentucky who does the normal beatboxing, Ned’s unusual range fluctuating between baritone and tenor in an easy jaunt. Others he can’t quite identify. Then the unmistakable sounds of chairs scraping and the piano closing up and backpacks being zipped float back to him. One by one, the members of the Chorallaries shuffle out, some chattering among each other and others with their chins tucked in and their headphones plugging up their ears.

Peter glances askance at them, trying to meld into the shadows. When several seconds pass after the last one has left and he still hasn’t seen Ned among the stragglers, he huffs out a couple of breaths, peels himself off the wall and swings inside the miniature auditorium.

Ned is inside, slumped at the piano bench with his back to Peter. He makes no indication that he’s heard Peter slip inside, save the infinitesimal stiffening in his shoulders.

“Ned,” Peter whispers. “Hey.” He startles at how his voice carries in the acoustics of the room.

Ned turns his head slightly to the side, though he doesn’t budge until Peter takes the initiative of striding over to him and sinking down onto the bench next to him. Peter slips his backpack off his shoulders and gently kicks it to the side. He turns to his boyfriend and dips his head, goading him to meet his gaze.

“Hey, Ned,” he whispers again.

“Hi, Peter,” says Ned at last, and his voice sounds all wrong.

“How you--how you been?” Peter says, lamely.

Ned’s answering chuckle is wet. “Good.” He stares at his hands in his lap, picks at a hangnail. “I mean...all right, I guess.”

“You didn’t...answer my texts. I got worried.”

“I know. Sorry.” 

“I don’t...want you to apologize,” Pete says carefully. “I just wanna know if you’re all right. And, and, you know...if you’re not...that’s okay. I dunno. I don’t know if you know that. Well, I guess, now I told you. That it’s okay if you’re not okay. And that I just wish you’d tell me so we could--we could figure out a way to make it sort of okay. You know? Together?”

Ned looks up at him then, his lips pressed into a thin line. His eyes have narrowed into the shape of diamonds in his effort to keep the moisture in. “You’re cute,” he chuckles again, half breathless, and completely irrelevant to whatever it is they’re talking about. “Y’know. When you do that. The rambling thing.”

Peter graces him with a toothy smile. “Yeah. You only tell me that like, three hundred thousand and seventy-two times a day.”

“Well, that’s ’cause I gotta keep saying it till you believe me.”

“I do believe you!”

“Do you?” It’s obviously a tired thread of an old joke, the overworn buildup to a punchline they are both already familiar with.

Peter meets Ned’s somber gaze and holds it, steady, willing with a force almost like steel for Ned to look back at him and never look away again. He lowers his voice. “Ned. I believe you. And I believe in you.”

“Oh. Geez.” Ned swipes quickly at his nose with a forearm. “Is it the guidance counselor pep talk? I’m pretty sure we both got traumatized by Principal Morita’s lectures on ‘potential’--”

“Ned, I’m serious.”

The other boy sags, falling silent.

“C’mon,” Peter pleads with him. He hesitates for a second, then shoots out his hand to latch onto Ned’s shoulder and he massages it with clumsy but well-meaning movements. “Come on,” he says again, even softer. “What’s going on? Is it stress? Is somebody bullying you?”

“It’s college, Peter, people don’t bully me,” Ned grumbles.

“People are assholes at any age,” Peter intones very seriously. “That’s--that’s a Tony quote. You can totally quote me back on that. Even to his face.”

Ned lets out an unwilling and surprised little snort.

“I miss your smile,” Peter goes on. “I miss your laugh. I miss your--your--the way you snort and and get all breathless and, like, smiley all over, even in your eyes, when you’re laughing so hard. And you’re swearing up and down that you’re literally gonna die and never come back to life again. Or on some days, when you try to change things up a bit and tell me you’re gonna die and then come back to life just so you can kill me, and then die again so we can be together.”

“I never said that,” Ned protests, eyes narrowed, momentarily distracted.

Peter leans back with a mildly affronted look. “Um, yeah you did. The Gonzagas’ party? Back in twenty eleven?”

“Oh my God,” Ned groans. He tips forward with his elbows on the edge of the piano cover. “Oh my God. Oh my God. I was _ten_. You can’t take my murderous instincts against me. My hormones were only, like, half-evolved at the time. Barely.”

Peter blinks. “That’s not how science works.” He blinks again. He taps Ned’s shoulder to get him to sit back up. “But. Regardless. I miss that. I miss--I miss _you_.” And he swallows back an invisible lump lodged at the back of his mouth, where the height and depth of his emotions are disguised behind his wisecracks and the wavering pitch of his voice.

He’s done more than enough crying for today.

“I’m right here,” Ned mumbles.

“Yeah. I know. But.” Peter shrugs. “Ned, you’re not...really here.”

“I’m _here_ ,” Ned repeats, and something in him sounds more alive than it has ever been since the beginning of this conversation. A touch of fire, heat, desperation. “I’m here. _I’m here_.”

Peter opens his mouth and closes it again, knowing in his bones that Ned is talking about something else. That he is talking about a thousand, a million, an infinity of other things.

“Okay,” he says slowly. “You’re here. You’re here now. Let’s start with that.”

Ned takes several moments to speak again, but when he does, he gets going and he doesn’t stop. The words keep gushing and gushing out of him like he’s been gutted by a torrential wound that will not close up.

“I don’t think you understand. I don’t--I didn’t understand. How I’m here. I’ve always been here, and people have seen me, they’ve seen me be here, they’ve--reacted to me being here, to me--being. But I don’t think, I don’t think they _understood_ me being here. Go to school, they said. Study computer science, they said. You’re talented. You’re amazing. You understand this stuff. You love it. _You_ love it. _You_ love it. Do I? Do I love it? Do I love it? I don’t know. Do I love it? Fucking--I got holed up in the lab on Saturday, you remember that, I was there for eight, nine, ten fucking hours and it was--I got up to go to the bathroom. There was a vending machine and I bought--I didn’t talk to anybody, there’s just this blond dude who was there with me, we talked like all of two lines about the rubber duck joke. Oh my God. I can’t--I like computer science. I like coding. It’s cool, I can do it, I can do it better than almost anybody else. You remember me hacking the suit? _Tony Stark’s_ Spider-Man suit? Oh my God. I wish--”

Peter watches Ned struggle to come up for air. He himself is mute, pressed flat by the weight of the sight of Ned bleeding out in front of him. He brushes his hand again to the space between Ned’s shoulder blades and rubs tentative circles into the skin there.

“--I wish I could go back to how happy I was then. The second the code came up--and I was in--it was like freaking _Christmas_. I don’t feel that. I like comp sci. But I love writing. I _love_ reading. I love building, like, not Lego, I love building _art_ , like, ceramics and shit. I love poetry. I love singing. I love-- _talking_ , God, _I love talking_. People hear me but when I’m talking they don’t _think I’m speaking_. And. And.”

Ned cuts himself off with a choke and a strangled sound that takes Peter’s heart in its claws and rends it in two from top to bottom.

“Shh, Ned, it’s okay,” he whispers. He rubs his the other’s back a little harder.

Ned goes on almost as if he hasn’t heard anything. “I’m just--always-- _there_. And everything I do, everything I am, it’s like--it’s decided for me. And I wouldn’t have realized, ’cause I would have been okay with it, and I would have worked and graduated and gotten a job and--done what everybody thought I was gonna do--until one day I wasn’t.”

A breath. Two breaths.

“One day I wasn’t okay with it.”

“I know,” Peter whispers again. “It’s okay. I hear you. It’s okay.”

“I know it is,” Ned says, finally looking up at his boyfriend, “but I don’t know how it’s going to be okay with my parents.”

Right. Shit. Mr. and Mrs. Leeds. Also known as the most Asian parents to ever Asian parent.

Peter ventures: “Have they...have they ever opened any discussion with you on the possibility of anything else?”

Ned lets out a bitter snort. “Yeah. Software engineering.”

“Fuck,” Peter swears softly. He moves his hand from Ned’s shoulder to his nape, and then the top of his hair, so he can gently coax his boyfriend’s head to rest against his shoulder.

Peter glances to the side and gnaws his lower lip. Beside him, Ned snuffles sporadically, the movement sending waves of shudders from his body to Peter’s.

“Fuck,” whispers Peter again. “What about...a compromise?”

Ned makes a sound of confusion. “Like...econ?”

“Er, yeah, I guess,” Peter replies with a wince. “Or like...history. Education. Psychology.”

Ned doesn’t say anything, and for Peter it is answer enough: anything remotely related to the humanities has been implicitly banned from the table.

They both sit there in continuance of Ned’s silence for what could be hours or what could be minutes. After a while, Peter startles at the hot trickle of moisture on the shoulder of his flannel shirt, but then he subsides and keeps himself very still against Ned’s body pressed to his side. And then he begins to run his fingers through his boyfriend’s hair with the shaking determination of one who would pour out all the love and comfort in his heart but does not know how or where to draw them from.

“They’ll stop loving me,” Ned whispers. The words flee from him and are magnified in the air of the auditorium, bouncing off the walls louder than any secret shouted from the rooftops.

Peter grows cold. “No, they won’t.”

“They’ll realize I’m useless. And that they never loved me.”

“That’s not true, Ned.”

“They’ll realize that--that they would have been better off not having a son, not having some--some goddamn _disappointment_ in their lives--”

“Ned!” Peter yells. He modulates his voice. “Ned. That’s not--stop. That’s not true. That’s not true. They love you.”

Ned is shuddering like he’s never known in his life how to be steady on his feet. “How do you know, Peter? How do you know? I’ve never known.”

“Babe, please, stop,” is all Peter can say, and he can’t look away even if his heart can’t take the blows anymore.

The words finally roll to a halt, and Ned closes his mouth and stares back at Pete, and his chest is heaving with the breath that neither of them realize they lost.

“Please stop,” Peter says again.

And Ned is quiet.

Peter drops a kiss to Ned’s hairline then with a murmured, “We’ll figure it out.”

The promise feels flat, worthless, the cheap answer of a helpless boy, but it’s all he’s got and it’s all the both of them have in the face of the unknown.

And so he presses another kiss to the top of Ned’s head, and another, and another, because maybe through that other language he may be able to convey the depth and the distance he will go for the one he loves.

“No matter what, I’m here,” Pete murmurs. The irony of his wording--of the _I’m here_ \--does not seem to be lost on either of them. “I’m here, babe. I love you. I’m here.”

\--

They do end up going out for gyros, the three of them. Secretly worried that his boyfriend may not be up for hanging out, Peter mothers all over Ned on the walk to the library where they’re going to meet Harley. Ned rolls him a look and flatly tells him to stop being a “balloon head” because apparently food is the number one distraction for him now that will help him avoid thinking about his parents.

Harley magnanimously takes upon himself the task of flicking bits of fried onion at Peter’s head whenever he senses the other boy drifting away into his thoughts over dinner. It happens all of six times, and every one of those six times there is a jab at Peter’s tingle--or, more appropriately, lack thereof.

“I feel like this is becoming a theme,” Peter complains. Loudly. His wild and unwilling smile says he is loving every minute of it.

“It is,” says Harley smugly. “You know how they made a theme song for you in those Avengers-inspired movies? _Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can_...” Ned has joined in on the purposely and heinously off-key chorus. “Yeah, you know that? We gotta make a jingle for the… _oh my God_.” Harley snaps his fingers excitedly at Ned, who finger guns him back with a worrying level of enthusiasm. “Oh my _God_ , a jaunty jingle for the Peter-tingle!”

Peter buries his head in his arms on the table with a flop of his hair. “You guys are human garbage. Absolute cretin. I’m telling on you to Tony.”

“Oh! Perfect idea!” Ned crows. “Get him in on it! He’ll probably get Mr. Rhodey to produce the backing track.”

\--

The days that plod by after that are far from perfect.

Peter takes to checking in on Ned one last time at his doorway every night. On the nights when Ned’s roommate goes over to a frat party or a girl’s room across campus--and those nights become more frequent as the semester goes by--Peter takes to poking his head in the doorway, glancing at the lump of Ned’s form under the layers of blankets, and simply stepping inside and closing the door behind him and padding over to slip in under the covers and curl around his boyfriend. They often don’t speak, but Ned releases a breath that seems like it was hanging invisibly between them until Peter’s arrival. Like everything remained in suspension until they were together again.

Because in more ways than one, this is true. That is what they are for each other.

And Peter runs the pad of his thumb over Ned’s knuckles as he spoons him, to speak for him the mushy things he has never been good at saying with his voice.

The days are far from perfect, but there are good days, and there are even phenomenal days, when Ned’s eyes crinkle back into that beloved diamond shape that Peter adores, and they shout cringeworthy puns at each other at the top of their lungs as they’re seated on the quad strewn with crackling leaves, clad in too-thin t-shirts and hollering at the sky with the defiance against adulthood that only the atmosphere of college can draw from deep within them.

On the night Ned calls his parents and makes it official, those diamond-shaped eyes go wet and bright like crystals. Peter holds him. He holds him and kisses him, and holds him tighter. _Firefly_ is going on the shitty TV screen behind them in the unlit lounge, full of static and the overly loud speakers covering the sound of Ned’s shuddering breaths.

Harley shuffles in ten minutes later with his flannel shirt on askew over his mismatched vegetable-print pajama set. He has his Black Widow mug in one hand, the mug with the chip on the rim, with his teal toothbrush sticking out of the top. He takes one look at the silhouette of his best friends caught by the glow of the screen, and he sets down the mug on the wobbly coffee table and shuts off the TV and feels around in the dark for Peter and Ned. None of them speak as Peter and Harley form a hug sandwich around Ned.

Then Harley starts humming the tune to “Happy Birthday” out of the blue, making Ned snort so hard he chokes and nearly falls off the couch.

(“Thanks, Harls,” Peter says drily.

Harley is defensive. “What? It was either that or Hozier. I panicked.”)

(But secretly none of them mind. With Harley and Peter and Ned, everything is weird, so weird that they are a special brand of normal that only makes sense to them. Maybe it comes from living so long with Tony Stark, who gave Peter chicken soup when he got a C on his oral presentation for history, who bought Pepper a twelve-foot-tall beast of a stuffed bunny when he couldn’t find a way to say he loved her, who made Aunt May a photo projector shaped like a silver egg so she could look at high quality pictures of Ben Parker again and think of all the egg-related puns Tony had told her at the same time.)

(Maybe all three boys are completely aware of where they get their weirdness from, and it’s okay with them.)

(It’s really more than okay.)

\--

When Peter begins to notice something going downhill with Harley, the noticing transitions so slowly into realization that later he will hate himself to the bones for it.

\--

No one answers when Peter knocks on Harley’s door. He still has his earbuds in and Panic! at the Disco blaring on his phone. He opens up WhatsApp a few seconds later and frowns when he sees his text to Harley has been left on read.

Peter takes out one of his earbuds, frown deepening. He raises his hand and raps again three times with his knuckle on the door. “...Harley? You in there? I’m ready to go if you are.”

A thump like an uneven drum beat reaches his ears. He would know that sound anywhere.

“Harls, what’s going on?” He lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “I can hear your heartbeat from inside, dude.”

A couple more seconds pass, during which sweat seeps over the palms of Peter’s hands for some unnamable reason.

Then the door creaks open a crack. In the gloom Peter can make out the tuft of Harley’s unkempt hair and the glisten of his eye.

“Not really feeling up to it, sorry,” Harley rasps out. “You guys--you guys meet up without me.”

“Woah, woah, wait. Are you sick?”

Harley tries to shut the door, but this time he can’t beat Peter’s mutated reflexes. The other boy jams his foot in the doorway.

“I’m not sick,” Harley says. The drag in his voice is bereft of his usual teasing twang. “I’m...not sick. Just...can I be alone for a while?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Half of it sounds like a question.

“I can just sit inside with you, if you want.”

“Nope. Go out. Tell MJ I said hi. I just...it’s kinda like an off day? I swear I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

That does not assure Peter at all. 

“Please,” Harley pleads in a mutter. He struggles to close the door again. “Please, Pete. _Please_.”

“Okay,” Peter whispers back. He shoves his hands in his pockets and, despite the screaming in his gut, pulls back his foot from the doorway. “Okay,” he says again. “I’ll tell her you said hi. Do you want Pop Tarts when I get back?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Apple cinnamon?”

“I’m fine, I swear. I’ll just nap for a while.”

“If you say so.” Peter tries a tight-lipped smile. “See you later, Harls. Hang in there, okay?”

The door shuts in the middle of Harley returning a slow, tired nod.

A few hours later, Harley opens his door again to head to the bathroom, and he finds a plastic bag hanging on his knob filled with not one, not two, but five boxes of apple cinnamon Pop Tarts.

And maybe he smiles a little, feeling rusty as he does so.

\--

_**Michael Jackson:** hayboy_

_don’t take this the wrong way but we missed you_

Harley’s phone lights up in the dark with MJ’s text as he sits in his tangle of sheets, staring at the device in his lap. He nearly doesn’t open it.

_**Hurley Kernel:** Is that a love confession_

_Ain’t a fan of it tbh_

_Sounds kinda constipated_

_**Michael Jackson:** what’s going on?_

_**Hurley Kernel:** Nothin_

_Bad day_

_Didn’t wanna have to bother you_

_I’ll make it up next time_

_**Michael Jackson:** dw about it._

_bad day or bad everything?_

_**Hurley Kernel:** Nosy much_

_**Michael Jackson:** jackass_

Harley scrolls up in their private thread for want of something to do as he considers what to say. It hits him then that up until now, their conversation has been occupied solely by memes and the occasional link to a Seth Everman video.

He finds he cannot pinpoint precisely why that makes his eyes sting or a lump of something rise in his throat.

_**Hurley Kernel:** Real talk?_

_**Michael Jackson:** always._

_**Hurley Kernel:** Bad everything_

Something in Harley settles in relief when he sees MJ takes two whole minutes to type her next message.

_**Michael Jackson:** can i call?_

_**Hurley Kernel:** Actually can I come over?_

_**Michael Jackson:** like right now_

_**Hurley Kernel:** Please_

_And sorry_

_**Michael Jackson:** dont be sorry_

_dont come to my dorm. too cold to walk_

_see u @ corner of harvard n quincy. southeast entrance of the library_

Harley leaves her on read, something telling him that shooting a _thank you_ text will just make her rail on him a little when they actually see each other. He moves faster than he has in days, stuffing his feet into his Vans, grabbing his lanyard, almost dropping his wallet. He’s already half out the door as he struggles to tug on the other sleeve of his varsity jacket from Tony.

The brutally icy air of 9PM doesn’t hit him until he has dashed onto the bus and sunk onto one of the stone-cold seats. Only then, too, does the magnitude--no, the weirdness--of what he’s doing actually hit him. 

He laughs a little incredulously under his breath.

\--

“I’m not lookin’ for you to mother me,” are the first words that tumble spontaneously and stupidly from Harley’s mouth the moment he alights from the bus and sees MJ silhouetted on the sidewalk against the uneven cast of the street light.

MJ turns to look at him. She has something balanced between the fingers of her right hand. For a while she doesn’t say anything, and then she takes her left hand out of the pocket of her anorak and yanks him inward for a hug. Her nose and chin press bonily into the side of his face, and he sinks into her, feeling something tug free from its anchor inside him, so much so that he couldn’t care less that this is the first time the two of them have touched outside of group hugs.

They pull apart after what must have been only seconds but felt more like a pocket of time. Without talking, they wander back toward the entrance of Harvard’s library.

MJ pauses just a moment to bring the thing in her hand to her mouth, take a last drag of the joint, and then stamp out the stub with her fingers and pocket it somewhere on her person. She feels Harley’s gaze trained on her and meets his eye steadily as she blows out a circle that pauses between them and then disintegrates on a gust of wind.

“Roommate doesn’t like the smell,” MJ says evenly.

Harley nods and holds the door open for her, watching her.

He continues watching her in easy silence as they pick a table in a far corner of the library café and she proceeds to dump four packets of sugar in her coffee. She flicks her gaze back up at him, quietly challenging him.

She takes a slurp. “What’s going on?” It’s spoken more like a statement, not a question.

“Nothing,” he says automatically. And corrects himself: “Everything.”

She hums. “I take it this isn’t a new thing?”

He stares at her. “How’d ya know?”

She flicks two fingers between her eyes and his. “I know things,” she jokes, but the sound of it is morose and too all-knowing.

“It wasn’t this bad before,” Harley mutters around a mouthful of tea. He drags his palm over his eye. “Or maybe it was. I don’t fucking know. It’s hard to remember.”

“Scientifically, depression kills brain cells,” MJ points out in that soft, blunt way of hers.

Harley snorts as if he knew this. He didn’t.

“Are you still eating?”

“Sometimes.”

MJ cocks a brow at him. “We’re college kids. We all eat ‘sometimes.’ Is this is a college-kid ‘sometimes’ or a real sometimes-sometimes?”

“You have a great vocabulary. I can’t believe you’re studying to be a lawyer,” Harley snarks, completely and blatantly ignoring her question.

“I’ll take that as a sometimes-sometimes,” MJ answers her own question. She grabs the brown napkin between them and starts compulsively shading the shape of a leaf in the center. Harley would have dismissed the odd tenderness at the end of her sentence, if not for the slight tremble in her hand as she colors in her doodle.

“What about you?” Harley asks, only slightly annoyed. “Do you smoke sometimes-sometimes?”

“Rarely, actually,” she says without looking up. “Only when I really need to. When I’m worried.”

Harley swallows. “You’re worried? About what?”

“You, idiot.”

Those two words feel like a bucket of ice upended over his head. For a minute he can’t breathe under the weight of the guilt, the shame, the--the _undeserving_.

“Do you take your meds for it?”

“Not since two years ago.”

“You stopped? Why.”

Harley clears his throat. “It ain’t cheap. Plus, y’know...I figured, my dad was gone, things were looking up for us, Tony was around and Charlie was gettin’ older and we were closer and...life didn’t seem so bad that I had a reason to be so sad all the time. I’d just. You know.” He shrugs. “Deal with it.”

MJ’s mouth presses into an angry line. Her voice is just above a breath, huskier than usual. “That’s not how it fucking works.”

“I know that’s not how it fucking works,” Harley mutters back. “What can I do?”

“Talk to Tony. He’d throw meds and therapy at you faster than you can blink.”

Harley serves her a hard, dead look, and when MJ looks up at him, that’s when she knows she messed up.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she says, sounding like she tastes coals in her mouth.

Harley glances away. “He has enough shit to worry about. So does Peter. And Ned. And you--” He exhales sharply through his nose. “You probably have a lot on your plate right now, too, and I’m just bein’ selfish and whiny. I’m sorry I came down here to bother you. I didn’t want you to see me like this in the first place. Sorry. I’m sorry.” He devolves into incoherent mumblings, hunching over and burying his face in his hands. “I’m sorry.”

MJ nudges the side of his calf with the tip of her Doc Marten. “Don’t be sorry.”

“I am.”

“Don’t.”

“Fuckin’ A, MJ, I can’t help it,” Harley whispers. “I feel it all the time. I’m sorry for bothering people, for feelin’ so sad when I ain’t got a reason to be. For hangin’ around you and taking up space and being the--being the weird one and--I feel sorry I came here and I feel sorry that I got myself stuck in this mess when I probably definitely knew I wasn’t ready before going in. I’m sorry I didn’t tell Tony I couldn’t handle it. I’m _sorry_ I can’t handle it. I’m a basketcase. Every little thing just-- _tips_ me and I’m angry at myself that I’m so weak, when there’s folks like Peter who literally got through high school doing AP courses on four hours of sleep every night ’cause he was saving people every day, and you and Ned who were under so much academic pressure, you guys volunteered the shit out of your Saturdays, and I’m here and I never did shit but I’m so _overwhelmed_ and it’s not fair that I got _in_ , I’m not even cut out for this--”

A pressure on Harley’s knee brings him back and grounds him. He glances down to find MJ’s booted foot there.

“Everyone gets overwhelmed,” MJ says softly. She holds up a finger when he opens his mouth to protest. “I know what you’re gonna say. Everyone else seems to be managing just fine. Well, that’s just it. _Seems_. We’re all dying on the inside because the way the whole American educational system has reached impossible standards and fucked us over just to get us to a place where we’re barely eligible for a job--” MJ cuts herself off with a sigh. “You know what, you don’t need the rant. What I’m trying to say is, some people feel overwhelmed but they manage to push through the trauma for four years, and it works for them. Some people feel overwhelmed and they listen to themselves and they take a break.” _Or quit_ , but she doesn’t say it. “And it works for them.”

Harley stares at her like that’s the most wonderful and the most deplorable news she’s dropped on him in her life. Like she has just pointed out a doorway out of the labyrinth in the distance, but there are thorns and bramble that he could never get through to grasp it.

“I can’t do that,” he says.

“Yeah, you can.”

“No, _I can’t_. I need a job--”

“Tony would gladly help out and it wouldn’t dent his bank account.”

“My family expects--”

“Your mom is the most supportive woman I have ever met. She expects nothing.”

“But I…”

MJ raises a brow. “But you…?”

“Then I’ll have fucked up.”

“Is everybody who takes a gap year a fuck-up?”

“Obviously not--”

“Then neither are you. If that’s what you decide.”

“But I’m _me_ ,” Harley huffs, like it’s the simplest explanation in the world. “I don’t have a _reason_ to even be this way.”

MJ stops and looks at him, truly looks at him. The brown of her eyes falls soft and wide. She sets down her coffee cup. “You don’t need a reason, Harley.”

Harley crosses his hands over his eyes. “Why are you talking to me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like--like you’re talkin’ to Peter.”

She nudges him again in the knee with her boot. “’Cause you two are the sweetest idiots I’ve ever met, and it shows.”

Harley sucks in a breath that burns through his nostrils. He’s drowning, drowning, drowning. He knew he should never have opened the floodgates. 

“Just so you know,” MJ adds, “in case it helps with some of the imposter syndrome...you’re not the only one who feels like the odd one out in the group.”

Harley peeks at her through his fingers. “Huh? ’Cause you’re the only girl?”

She rolls her eyes. “No, dingus. ’Cause I’m the only one who isn’t out.”

He stops. Lowers his hands. Words fail him, and he simply watches MJ lean back in her chair and spiral the paper wrapping of her straw around her index finger.

“I like girls,” she tacks on quietly. “Just--girls.” She stares at the table.

Now it is Harley’s turn for his gaze to bore into her. “You never told them?”

“Yeah. No. It messed me up pretty badly. One of the--one of the many reasons I decided not to go to the exact same school as them.”

Harley knits his brow. “Uh, what? Why? Ned said he came out when he was twelve, so you knew. And Peter figured out he was bi like, several years ago.”

MJ’s mouth twitches compulsively into something between a smile and a curve of sadness. “Yeah, and that was when he had a crush on me.”

At Harley’s stare, MJ glances up with a pained grin. “Yup, exactly,” she says.

“Fuck,” he breathes out. His hand reaches of its own volition across the table and latches clumsily onto MJ’s.

“Look at us,” MJ chuckles. “A couple of queers hanging out and holding hands.”

Harley’s voice is choked but he shoots for a jest anyway. “Two bros. Chilling in a café, no feet apart ’cause they’re supportively gay.”

“Could’ve used less syllables.”

“I’m makin’ this shit up on the fly, Michelle.”

“I guess you tried your best.”

“I panicked.”

“A+ for effort.”

“So…” Harley draws out the vowel between his teeth. “Why don’t you tell them now?”

“Probably ’cause it’s gonna sound super hard to believe,” MJ replies lamely, stupidly. “Can you imagine, four friends all turning out to be gay?”

“The power of the gaydar is what drew us together,” Harley intones with a finger of wisdom raised in the air.

“Put your hand down, you dork.”

“Nothing’s gonna change, MJ. We’re, like, the most fucking supportive idiots in your life right now, probably.”

“Yeah, well, the timing sucks, y’know? Like. Me coming out in college. It just sounds like...I went to some parties, experimented with some girls and then bam, now I think I’m gay.”

Harley frowns. “That is _not_ what I thought of, at all.” Then he narrows his eyes. “Wait. There’s someone, isn’t there.”

She shifts uneasily in her chair. Crumples up the napkin and flits her eyes at him for the briefest of seconds. “Maybe. Her name’s Gwen.”

“Who’s Gwen?”

This time MJ rolls him a look, and understanding strikes Harley like a sledgehammer. He gasps. “And they were _roommates_.”

“Fuck off, Keener. We were supposed to be talking about your gap year.”

“I am a meme machine and I will not be silenced. Tell me all about Gwen, stat. Where she’s from, what she looks like, I swear to God if you do not have an entire folder in your camera roll dedicated to creep shots of her doin’ domestic shit, I am gonna be _so_ disappointed in you--”

MJ cuts him off with a laugh, one so sudden and genuine that it knocks her backward with the force of it, and she crosses her arms over her stomach as if to hold in all the mirth lest she break apart from letting all of it out.

For a moment, Harley just looks at her and truly sees her, and he sees a shard of himself reflected in the brilliance of her multifaceted glass parts. And he’s able to breathe just a little bit, because he thinks she’s beautiful. They’re beautiful.

\--

But Harley soon drifts away from the feeling of being seen and being known in the honesty of his pain. MJ’s words roll around in his head in silence for too long until they start to lose the shape of what they originally meant.

He knows he’s a failure. He knows he deserves nothing.

Ned bakes him an ensaymada out of the blue. He and Peter deliver it, a giant lopsided mass of potato bread and sugar, to the door of his room. He lets them in and they feast on it using the backs of unused homework printouts as their plates, and they play one of their side D&D campaigns loudly but blanketed by a larger quietness that they cannot shake. An awareness that something has shifted--is about to shift--but they know not what it is.

Harley laughs a lot that day, and he almost thinks it’s genuine. He wishes it weren’t, because then he wouldn’t feel even guiltier that he needs this, he needs _them_ so much and they won’t be there if he takes the solution MJ proposed.

\--

He slips. He stops eating.

\--

He knows how to act well enough, despite it all. That’s all he’s ever known how to do until he dumped himself on the doorstep of MIT.

\--

And then the next thing he knows, Harley is on the rooftop of a parking garage and his hands are shaking and he has, somehow, somewhere, by some force of terrible nature, dialed Peter.

It’s half past three. Nobody should be awake at this godforsaken hour.

Peter answers on the fifth ring. His voice lilts from being pulled from sleep. But he’s there, he sounds present, to Harley he vaguely feels--aware. “Harley?”

“You told me to trust you,” is what Harley says instead of _hello_ , or _I’m sorry_ , or _I need to talk_. “I trust you.”

Out of everything, months down the line, out of the nights that blur together in his memory from the sameness of his pain or erase themselves from his mind out of numbness, it will be this one fact that he will return to that he knows with certainty. That he opened his mouth and all that came out was _I trust you_ , and that it was right and true because nothing could be righter or truer about him and Peter.

There must be the rustle of sheets as Peter stands up on the other end of the line, but Harley misses it in the swirl of his thoughts.

“I’m coming to you,” Peter says. “Where are you?”

Harley tells him, through landmarks and half-spoken directions, because honestly he himself cannot recall how or why he chose this place to be where he could be spending his last moments.

Peter is there in less than two minutes. Harley hears him this time, even though Peter is stealthy when he needs to be. He hears the last _thwip_ of web fluid that tells him his best friend swung here the fastest way he knew how.

Harley turns around, and his suspicions are confirmed when his gaze dips and he catches sight of Peter pulling the sleeves of his pea coat lower over his webshooters.

Peter walks to him. He stops five feet away.

“You’re awfully close to the edge,” he says quietly.

Harley hates how the first thing that rises to his mind is that it sounds like a metaphor. _Goddamn theater kid_ , he could laugh hysterically at himself.

“Why don’t you take a step toward me?” Peter says. “One at a time. So I don’t have to go there and be close to the edge, too.”

The distinct lack of stuttering strikes Harley. Then the realization punches him in the gut.

“I’m sorry you have to do this with me,” says Harley. His tone sounds almost normal. “You probably got enough of this around Queens.”

“Harley. Step toward me, please?”

Harley doesn’t want to. He stands there between freedom and pain, and perhaps Peter’s face and eyes and open arms are a promise of a soft landing for him, but still Harley stands there with his hands in his pockets. When suddenly he can’t breathe, he realizes that the snot is pouring fast and ugly from his nose. His face is drenched.

But he trusts Peter. He trusts him like he has never trusted anyone before in his life.

So he takes a step toward his brother. And another, and another, until something breaks loose in Peter and he jogs the last bit of the way to close the distance between them and he flings his sinewy arms around Harley.

Peter is shorter than Harley by more than half a head, and yet as Harley is knocked back an inch by the force of Pete’s embrace and they sway there together on the concrete under the moonlight, Harley has never felt more small in his life.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” Peter mutters in his ear, over and over again. “I’ve got you. Don’t let go. I’ve got you.” It is the first time that night his voice cracks.

“You got me,” Harley says.

“I’ve got you.”

“ _You got me_.”

“Yeah, I got you. Always, Harls.”

“You must be cold.”

“Not as cold as you,” Peter points out. He shrugs off his pea coat and drapes it around Harley, and promptly goes back to hugging him. Harley presses his nose, sharp and cold, against the top of Pete’s head.

“I don’t deserve you,” says Harley.

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t. I don’t deserve any of this. The world would be better off if--”

“Don’t you fucking dare finish that sentence,” Peter whispers fiercely. He’s pulled away a fraction to pin Harley with his gaze, shining and full of the fractured rainbows of his unshed tears. Harley is torn down by another wave of guilt for reaching into Peter’s chest and planting that pain there with his own hand.

Peter goes on after a beat, “I love you, Harley. Charlie loves you. Ned loves you. MJ loves you. Tony loves you, and Pepper, and Happy, and May and Uncle Rhodey, they all love you.” And again, for good measure: “I love you.”

“I fucked up,” Harley replies, high-pitched on a sob.

“I doubt it, but even if you did, I still love you.”

“I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. I want it to all stop.”

“I know. And we can make that happen, right, Harls? We can make that happen the proper way. We can talk about it.” Peter’s arms snake higher, tighter, over Harley’s shoulders. “Just don’t forget I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Harley mumbles.

Peter’s curls tickle the bottom of Harley’s chin when he shakes his head. “I didn’t say it to make you say it back. I said it so you would know.”

“I need you to know I can’t do this anymore,” Harley replies.

“I know. I know. And...it’s okay.”

That single line shoots home in the middle of Harley’s chest. He comes untethered, crumbles, folds in on himself right then in there in Peter’s arms. He has no strength left to hold himself up and would have tumbled to the concrete if not for the infinite strength of Peter’s hands buoying him up. He sobs, and he sobs, and he shakes from his core to the very tips of his fingers and the hairs on his skin because never before has he allowed himself to not stand steady on his own two feet.

“I’m sorry,” he says again in between the hitching of his breaths. “I never meant to...make you go through this with me. You don’t--you don’t--you don’t deserve this.”

Peter’s voice is gentle. “You’re not making me do anything. I’m doing this because I want to.”

“I’m sorry I lied.”

“You didn’t lie. You just thought you could keep it inside.”

“I could,” Harley gasps out. “I could. I--did. But it--fuck. _Fuck_. It hurts _so much_.”

Peter tugs the edges of the pea coat closer around the two of them. He rubs his hands up and down Harley’s shoulders. “Let it out. This is--this is good. Just--let it out.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry.”

“I know.” A bob of Peter’s throat as he swallows. “I’m here.”

Peter’s answer is quiet and thunderous, like the promise of the rainstorm after the buzz of heat in the ground on a sweltering August evening. He is the streak of fire in the sky as Iron Man takes off in the distance and comes flying to the rescue. He is the sound of cannons from shore. Present and comforting, and terrifying in its power, and beautiful. 

\--

The weekend before Thanksgiving break, they ditch their study group in favor of ordering two dozen Krispy Kremes, cramming in a row of teenage fatigue on Peter’s bed and watching _Friends_.

After the fourth episode, Peter stretches, and the rest of them follow suit, rearranging themselves around the room. When MJ sees Peter snapping his shirt back and forth over his chest, she cranks open the window. A warm wind tousles her curls when she sticks her head out.

“Heat wave,” she announces. “Something good, for once. Halloween was freaking freezing.”

Harley glances at her, wondering if she means anything special by the reference to Halloween. Only he knows--their private chat thread has become a gossip channel about Gwen, really--but he’s fairly certain MJ is hinting to him, and him alone, about her and Gwen’s first almost-kiss that happened back in her dorm after she left the boys around midnight on Halloween.

Peter hums in agreement. Somehow, he has ended up on the rug in the middle of the room, the multicolored braided one he and his roommate Charlie got from Target randomly last month. He has his eyes half-lidded as he watches MJ at the window. Ned is snuffling around the donut boxes for seconds.

Slowly, deliberately, MJ pulls a joint out of a small ziploc in her pocket, and she lights it. Nobody reacts.

MJ flits her gaze to Harley. He’s the only one left on the bed, having had no energy to move or do much of anything since the night on the parking garage. He does have the strength to wonder now, though, if she’s thinking what he’s thinking.

That now is the time for confessions.

 _You go first_ , he communicates to her with his eyes, smally, a little selfishly.

MJ pops her jaw as if in acknowledgment. Harley drops his head back down to his chest.

The girl looks at them. She looks at all of them, every single one of her three beloved idiots, she drinks in their sight. Then she takes a drag from the joint in her fingers. She hates that she needs this to say what she wants to say next, but--hate is a strong word.

"Hey, guys." She turns her head to blow the smoke out the window in a tug of the breeze. "I'm a lesbian."

The first one to jerk his head upward at that is Harley, even though he’s been expecting this all along. Ned continues picking the black sprinkles off his donut because--because that's just what he does, and Peter is still fake-dozing on the floor with his feet up on the wall next to MJ's head.

In the end, it's him who breaks the buzzing silence.

"It's amazing how all four of us being gay is, like, the least statistically weird thing about us," he mumbles from the carpet behind closed eyes.

MJ is surprised by a grin so wide her lip splits. The pain doesn’t even register as she licks the drip of blood away. "Sure, Spider-Tights."

Peter pops open an eye. “I’m serious. What are the odds of being gay? About two hundred eighty million to one. Like, really. But what are the odds of somebody getting bitten by a radioactive spider that gives him superpowers _and_ him being guilt-ridden enough to become a vigilante? Like, seven and a half billion to one.”

“It could be seven and a half billion to two,” Ned interjects. “Maybe what MJ is trying to say is she’s a lesbian _and_ she’s gonna be the new Spiderwoman so she’s coming for your suit.”

MJ blows out another circle. “I actually liked ‘Spinnerette’ better.”

Peter rolls his eyes. “I thought my puns were the worst thing invented since kale blueberry shakes. Which, don’t let Tony ever hear you say that, ’cause I actually tried the stuff he drinks and it is the shit.”

MJ arches her brow at him. “They are the worst thing invented. But you do get it right twice a decade.”

Peter, who’s been pillowing his head with his hands, slaps a palm over his chest. “All my years of practice, all for _nothing_.”

Ned snickers at his side. MJ joins in, actually smiling, maybe even letting out a little giggle.

Peter rolls his head slightly to the side to look up at Harley. Harley looks right back at him with honesty. He has no defenses left.

 _You knew_ , Peter seems to be saying. There’s no accusation to it, just simple wonder.

Harley cracks him an apologetic little half-smile.

And then his moment comes. It’s now or never. It’s the four of them, just like it always has been and just like it should be. He knows the second he opens his mouth and he says it, the truth will be sealed and there’s no going back. No going back to--possibly _this_ , this easy and lazy warmth of the four of them hanging out like old times.

But Peter is right. 

It’s good to let it out.

Harley draws his knees up to his chest and circles them with his arms. “Guys? You should know something.”

Ned sits up at attention, bless his soul. Peter himself smears the sleep from his eyes and eases himself upward on the rug, supporting his weight with his hands behind him.

“I have depression,” Harley rushes ahead over a quiver of a breath. “Like. Actual clinical depression. I was diagnosed with it several years ago and I used to--um. Well. It’s a thing I have. It’s a thing I...live with.”

“That’s really brave of you, dude,” Ned whispers into the lull in Harley’s speech.

Harley nods, but he refuses to look at Ned, because if he looks directly at any of them he’ll lose his nerve and he’ll never get the rest out. “This semester was a lot for me. I didn’t think it would be, but--it was. I almost--well--I practically hit rock bottom.”

Even from here Harley can feel Peter’s eyes boring into him. Cannons, cannons, he tells himself. Rainstorm. Peter is here for him. That moment on the rooftop may stay between the two of them till they die, but anyone could see from a mile away that Peter would die for him.

Harley sucks in a breath. “So I need to get back on medication. Get back to--get back to talking to somebody, probably, I gotta sort that shit out with Tony, too, I know. So...I guess what I’m tryin’ to say is, I’m not coming back in the spring.”

Peter blinks. Ned wipes his fingers on the knee of his sweatpants, and MJ scratches at her hairline.

“Like...not coming back ever, or just not coming for the semester?” Ned asks gently.

“I don’t know,” says Harley. “It’s a--it’s a thing I didn’t plan. I have to see how long they’ll let me have a leave of absence.”

“Take as long as you need,” Peter says.

“We’ll be here,” MJ acquiesces.

“You could get a place here in Cambridge, maybe,” Ned suggests offhand. “If you wanted to be close to us but not, like, have to attend class or whatever. Mr. Stark probably wouldn’t mind.”

“I know he wouldn’t, and thanks for--that, I guess,” Harley says carefully. “But maybe...a change of environment would be good.”

“Tennessee?” MJ asks.

“Maybe. Sure. Why not. Or maybe half of it in New York or somethin’, with Tony, if he needs my opinion on...whatever it is he designs these days. Roombas. Smoothie robots.”

“That’s a good plan,” says Peter. Harley is struck by the earnestness in his tone. “Harley, that’s a _great_ plan. Just...have people in your corner. You’ll have us here if you wanna come visit, you’ll have Tony and May and the rest there if that’s where you’re staying. There’s so many of us, Harls. You’re never running out of people in your corner.”

“I know,” says Harley, choking once. “Goddammit, I know. Couldn’t get rid of you pests even if I tried.”

MJ grins wolfishly at him, just because she can. Ned clambers to his feet and launches at the bed and misses, but Harley barks out a laugh and catches him in time to pull him up as Peter boosts him from the bottom. Ned is the first to wrap his arms around Harley warmly, completely, and then Peter follows, and then MJ. 

Harley inhales deeply and opens his eyes to find Peter staring back at him, doing the same. As the smell of smoke and a tired freedom drifts around them, and inconsequential voices chatter in the background from the hallway beyond their door and outside on the pavement through the window, the four of them exchange glances, tighten their embraces on one another.

Because so much has changed, and yet so much is still the same.

So much is the same, because they are here, together, in body and in parting.

They are here, and they are beautiful, and they are brave. And they are safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger summaries: Harley and MJ discuss his history with depression, and she suggests he take time off from school. She comes out to him as a lesbian and they end up joking around. Later, Harley goes to the rooftop of a parking garage, implicitly considering ending his life, but he calls Peter instead. Peter comes to him, hugs him and comforts him as Harley confesses he can't handle college right now.
> 
> Ok so...Ned's meltdown over computer science and Harley's scene in the parking garage are totally, completely, definitely not evidence of me projecting on my faves :)))
> 
> Thank you for the super positive feedback on the last two chapters, guys. They spurred me on to slog through Part 3, even though it took a while because I was drawing from a place of deep pain from when I was seventeen and in college for the first time and feeling more lost than ever before. I'm in a much better place now, of course, but writing this still felt cathartic, as if in a way I was releasing myself from the guilt of things I felt and did when I was much younger and drowning in depression.
> 
> Obviously, much of this chapter relied on an unreliable narrator (Ned's, MJ's and Harley's negative voices about themselves), but I tried to include the flip side of their characters as comforters, because we all need to remember that whatever it is we're going through...it's all going to be okay. Sometimes we need to listen to our discomfort and take a step back, and that's okay. 
> 
> I love you and support you all, in everything you're experiencing. Y'all are strong and badass and I appreciate you so much. And of course, as always, I'm always around to talk if you need me. <333 -kaleb
> 
> p.s. I'm considering adding an epilogue with a short scene of Tony, Harley and Peter when they come back home. Do you feel that's necessary, or is it anticlimactic after the last scene in this chapter? I would LOVE to hear your honest thoughts on this!! Thank you so much for reading and supporting, always!!!

**Author's Note:**

> [fic moodboard](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/mcu-under-the-stars-of-orion/)


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